"Nik" said:
Hi
I should have asked this first I suppose, but do I need to do anything other
than selecting a 10% Overclocking in the Bios of my P4P800SE mo/bo?
I realise certain setups require additional cooling, etc. I'm running a P4
3.2 currently at 3.5ghz, FSB is showing at 880.
It seems ok, I tried it at 20% but it crashed halfway through 3DMark03pro so
I took it down to 10%.
I'm still only getting a score of around 3000.
I'm really trying to achieve higher framerates etc. in games, I've got a GF
FX5700 256MB, should I be attempting to O/C that instead?
Thanks.
Nik.
P4 3.2ghz/512MB DDR PC3200 400mhz Samsung RAM/Maxtor 200GB SaTa/WinXp
Home/Asus P4P800SE MoBo
If you read the posts over on Abxzone.com, they don't use the AI
Overclocking feature on these boards, and set the timings manually.
The AI Overclocker does some dumb stuff, that a real overclocker
wouldn't do. For example, the AI doesn't know anything about how
to handle exotic memory, whereas the person who bought it, knows
what timings the product is rated for, and can plug those into
the manual memory timing panel.
In your case, set the memory to "DDR333", as that selects the 5:4
CPU:MEM divider. That allows the FSB to be overclocked by up to
25%, without pushing the memory past its spec. With that setting,
you don't even need to mess with the other memory timings, and can
just concentrate on the FSB.
If you memory is flaky, remember that DDR400 rated ram, wants 2.6V
instead of the 2.5V used for DDR333 or lower. Run memtest86 from
memtest.org, and give the memory only enough voltage to make it
error free, as extra voltage only makes the ram chips get hot.
And a hot ram chip is a slow ram chip (CMOS gets slower with
rising temperature).
The AGP/PCI should already be locked to 66/33MHz, by virtue of
the Auto setting. I think there is a 72/36MHz setting, and that
will allow virtually any AGP card to pass data slightly faster.
Higher than this is asking for trouble, due to the PCI bus
failing at roughly 37.5Mhz. There is no need to play with the
AGP I/O voltage, unless the VPU acts flaky. Most video cards
have some kind of tweaker software, and you can play with the
core and mem clocks on the video card - the only thing I would
suggest is that you monitor the temperature of the card, as video
cards are too expensive to burn up. I've already noticed the
inductors on my ATI 9800 get extremely hot, even at stock speed.
You might get a copy of Powerstrip from entechtaiwan.com . I use
that utility solely for the Options item in the popup menu, as
it shows AGP 8X, Fast Write, DMA/Dime enabled etc, and you can see
whether the drivers you are using are working right. I don't bother
using that program to try to force settings.
If your memory is CAS2, you might investigate what setting is
required to get PAT or the equivalent Hyperpath (pick a marketing
term) enabled. A copy of CTIAW can be used to check what the
hardware is set to.
ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/ctsi/ctiaw.zip
Not every one has a high opinion of that utility:
http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showpost.php?p=486421&postcount=38
Enter "CTIAW" as a search term here, and you can read up on the
current crazyness going on at Abxzone.com:
http://www.abxzone.com/forums/search.php
HTH,
Paul
