Advice to modestly OC my 3600 x2

[jraddatz]

last thing I oc'd was a celeron 366 to 450mhz...

I have a Athlon brisbane 3600+ x2 on an ECS K8M890M-M Socket AM2 Motherboard, with:
stock cooling

( i dont know if this other stuff matters)
EVGA-P2-N550 - Geforce 7600GT
Buffalo Select 1GB DDR2 667 Ram

A little special circumstance:

My MB gave out last week. My CPU was on the MB for 14 days, I went out and got a new MB and switched it over without scraping the thermal paste off and applying new stuff. Is this going to be an issue?

Any advice would help, would like to get this to 2.5ghz or so

 

[f4phantom2500]

you should clean the cpu off and apply new thermal paste for best results. most ecs boards aren't known for their overclocking abilities, nor are via chipsets, and since your board is both (at least the model name suggests a via chipset to me), i doubt it would really do very well. there are a lot of guides on overclocking am2 rigs around the internet, probably a few good ones here on anandtech even. basically increase your fsb, adjust the memory and ht dividers as necessary to keep them as close to stock (or what you know is stable, in the case of the ram) as possible, and adjust the voltages as necessary.

 

[spittledip]

I just got the same chip and a ECS budget board for a build for my mother-in-law. The board is what held my overclock back. I even have value RAM and that was fine (of course it is corsair, so that helps) However. I could not get the FSB past 265, so the highest clock I got was 2517, and this without upping the voltage. I did not try to up the voltage on the FSB.. maybe I will.. but probably not b/c it is not my computer At any rate, the chip is a great overclocker. Hopefully your board will do better. Also, that chip stays so cool!! Core temps are at 32 and 25. It is about 75 F inside.

 

[cubeless]

just did a biostar tforce 500 build... got to 2.85 w/3600 and a freezer pro 64 and stt 667 ram... only had to push up the voltage a tiny bit... with a 8800gts320 oc's a bit it does 9300 3dmk06's... great 1440x900 gamer...

 

[AlabamaCajun]

I've seen 2.8 with an X3600 on a ECS485M2 on stock volts pushing DDR667 CL5 to DDR550 at CL3 on the 400 divider or DDR680 at CL4 on the 533 divider. Despite the low level of OC features, with a little effort they can squeeze out some nice stock volt OCs. I can't vouch for VIA other than to say they held the crown until NVidia kicked in some nice NForces chipsets. I had to play musical BIOS flashes to get my 485 to rock finally settling back on the original bios (luckly I saved it before flashing).
Biostar is ruling with the TF550 amongst budget OCers.

Set the LDT or HT multi to 4X instead of Auto or 5X this just controls the IO bus to video and HD (ram is on it's own bus). You only need about 800-900MHZ of bandwidth until you go to a real high end video card or crossfire/SLI setup.
For now drop your ram divider to one lower than spec, you can experiment with higher ram later.
Set VDimm to 1.9 (2.0 for overclocking ram).
Set your VCore to 1.325, some people get to 2.6 before needing to raise it to 1.35. The lower you can oc it the better. Spec calls for 1.25-1.35 so you are still in range.
Bring up the HTT to 220, it should boot and allow you to check out results.
From here, you can raise it 5 to 10mhz at a time testing to see when it starts acting up. Then back up 10mhz and test for stability.
You should reach 2.6, if not, you may need to hand tweak ram timing or drop the divider one more.
When just starting out it pays off to experiment with small tweaks until you know the CPU and MOBO.
Watch temps, you want the CPU below 55C when loaded, below 50 is better and usually more stable. A better heatsink with heatpipe may be in order is temps are high. Keep volts near spec until you can keep temps down. I won't reccomend over 2.0 on Ram or 1.375 on the CPU but it's your call.

 

[jraddatz]

... wow

Thanks!