OC'ing Compaq 5WV254

[Larry]

I was desparate for a working, reasonable system until DDR boards are more commonly available at my local hardware reseller(s).So, i bought this Duron based system figuring i can give it to my daughter when i can finally purchase a stable motherboard, DDR RAM, and all the other components i want/need.
Anywho, haven't opened my box yet, but at the Circuit City the salesman was good enough to let me examine the inside of the box. Couldn't tell what make of mother board was installed, but looks ok.
I'm very familiar with what and how to OC the ASUS, ABIT, MSI and some of the other MBs discussed on Toms HW, but doubt whether COMPAQ has made it an easy proposition with BIOS, and I certainly didn't see any jumpers to change like on thew ASUS boards. Any help/ideas would be appreciated.

 

[TheSandman]

Your best bet would be a software aproach like softfsb by H. Oda available at www.h-oda.com




SANDMAN

 

[Crashman]

I don't think you can use SoftFSB on a Duran Duran, I mean Duron system. You can still overclock it by changin the briges like everyone else seems to be doing with Athlons and Durons and T-birds (oh my!).

 

[TheSandman]

Crasman is right somehow I missed that it was a duron, but you want to check for multiplier and cpu voltage controls either in your bios or jumpers on the board, also you should check out overclocking AMDs socket procesors, this could be helpfull if you do not have the controls I mentioned.

SANDMAN

 

[phsstpok]

SoftFSB works with my Duron and a Abit KT7 motherboard but I don't use it because I can overclock via the multipler.

 

[Crashman]

Yes and no. Yes I know that it will work, but no, I don't believe you can go more than a couple mhz bus speed that way. AMD's are notorious for not supporting increased bus speeds.

 

[phsstpok]

Sorry, I misunderstood your meaning.

It is true that Athlon/Durons, generally, cannot tolerate more than about a 7 Mhz increase in FSB speed. However, they usually can tolerate a substantial multiplier increase.

The best I have done with my 600 mhz Duron is to increase FSB from 100 to 106 and the multiplier from 6 to 9.5 for a resultant CPU speed of 1007 Mhz, 141 Mhz DRAM, 37 Mhz PCI Bus, 71 Mhz AGP Bus base. I have to run with the case open for the system to remain stable. Normally, I just run at 900 Mhz with no FSB overclocking.

At 900 Mhz, I occassionally find it helpful to be able to bump the FSB to 107 from within Windows 98SE using SoftFSB.