Lord Evermore
Diamond Member
Overclocking without increasing voltage is almost totally safe. Don't attempt an immediate 500MHz bus speed, just bump it up slowly from 400 to 410, 425, et cetera until you feel like you've got a good speed and it's stable. Or go as high as you can until it starts to be unstable, then clock it back down a few notches. You can't burn out the processor by increasing the speed unless you use a severely inadequate heatsink or put it on wrong, and the P4 has protection against overheating anyway.
Obviously the reason you can get more memory and other stuff with an Athlon is the Athlon only needs 333MHz memory at default speeds for a 2500+. Move up to a 3000+ and 400MHz memory, and the P4 becomes more competitive price/performance-wise. A 2.8GHz P4 is slightly more expensive than an XP 3000+, but will perform at least as well, and can probably overclock a lot better if you're into that. A 2.6GHz P4 costs less than a 3k+ and will perform almost as well.
The PR scheme is really hurting AMD in my eyes, and is contributing to my leaning towards Intel. It obviously isn't really doing anything for them in the consumer space, nobody just looks at the rating they look at the actual speed, which every system builder specifies, and big name OEMs still aren't using XPs (I mean the top-tier, not Alienware, et. al.). The fact that the ratings change every time they make the slightest modification makes it more confusing than just giving us a frequency for the chip and bus, and a cache size and letting us figure out for ourselves that an Athlon performs better than a P4 per-clock.
Obviously the reason you can get more memory and other stuff with an Athlon is the Athlon only needs 333MHz memory at default speeds for a 2500+. Move up to a 3000+ and 400MHz memory, and the P4 becomes more competitive price/performance-wise. A 2.8GHz P4 is slightly more expensive than an XP 3000+, but will perform at least as well, and can probably overclock a lot better if you're into that. A 2.6GHz P4 costs less than a 3k+ and will perform almost as well.
The PR scheme is really hurting AMD in my eyes, and is contributing to my leaning towards Intel. It obviously isn't really doing anything for them in the consumer space, nobody just looks at the rating they look at the actual speed, which every system builder specifies, and big name OEMs still aren't using XPs (I mean the top-tier, not Alienware, et. al.). The fact that the ratings change every time they make the slightest modification makes it more confusing than just giving us a frequency for the chip and bus, and a cache size and letting us figure out for ourselves that an Athlon performs better than a P4 per-clock.
