22 Jul
2004
22 Jul
'04
8:48 a.m.
Matthew Barber wrote:
->I have the same mobo and processor. I couldn't
find anywhere in the
Award BIOS to over clock? Where iz? And I think mine only runs at 166mhz
fsb. It has 333mhz DDR RAM.<-
I could be wrong, but I don't think that with that memory you'd want to
clock the system bus past 166 (since it's "DDR" -- "double data
rate"
RAM, the actual FSB clock is half of what it says it is)... and I think
that after a certain point AMD started locking the multiplier capability
in their athlons since people were overclocking them so much, so you
can't set the multiplier in the BIOS (I've heard of some workarounds
that require a CPU modification, but I don't know if they work now). If
you got some faster memory, though, you could probably overclock the
bus. Am I right about this?
M
On my bios (rev. 1005) adjusting the CPU frequency is under
"Advanced>Advanced Chipset Features>Cpu External Frequency". Although
other settings on the same page dictate how much this value increases or
decreases (1mhz at a time or 33mhz at a time). I believe that "System
Performance" must be set to "User Defined" to get 1mhz increases in
speed. I started thinking about all of this overclocking stuff from a
article I read on the RME website, here it is:
http://www.rme-audio.com/english/techinfo/nforce2_tweaks_01.htm . This
article pertains only to the Asus A7N8X mobo with the Nforce2 chipset.
With my revision 2.0 mobo there was no voltage increase necessary, it
stayed at 1.65v. However, like the article says, I did have to move the
CPU speed jumper on the mobo from the 133/166 position to the 100
position (yes, it sounds wierd, but it works) to get to a 200mhz fsb.
Also, I set the "AGP Frequency" to 66mhz so its locked at that, and
there aren't any problems from the video card or pci bus being
overclocked. Keep in mind though that the older revision 1.* mobo's are
different than mine, but the RME article covers them also.
My Athlon 2500 (1yr old) does have the multiplier unlocked and is
adjustable from the bios. However, the newer 2500's are all locked, **
EXCEPT** the Athon-M (mobile) CPU's and those will fit in the same CPU
socket. Another plus to the Athlon mobile processors is they use less
voltage (1.45) and withstand higher tempatures (~195F) before they shut
down (or melt :)) and are just a little more expensive.
As far as memory is concerned, in the bios there is a setting
called (ironically) "Memory Frequency", you have the option to run the
memory at percentages of the processor speed (83%-100%-%125). I was
fortunate in that my Samsung PC2700 did overclock from 166mhz to 200mhz,
although I did have to relax the timing's on it from 2-3-2-7 to 3-3-3-8
and increase the voltage from 2.6v to 2.7v to get it to stabilize.
However, *it will not pass memtest86* and starts generating errors
within a hour of running memtest. When I'm doing any kind of recording I
always run it at %83 of 200mhz (166mhz) just to be safe, otherwise it
stays at 200mhz, and I don't notice any problems even when the CPU is
under a high load (%95 utilization) for an extended period of time (4hrs
or more) while I play Unreal Tournament 2004 the new latest and greatest
video game available on Linux. When I can afford it I will buy some
PC3200 memory that has really low latency timings (2-2-2-6).
Rick B