Athlon overclocking: fsb or multiplier?

[Xtasy]

I have a athlon t-bird 1200(200mhz) Should i sacrifice multiplier for more fsb? or the other way. For example, i can run my cpu at 1400 (266mhz)(wall hit near 280mhz fsb) or at 1360 (300 mhz fsb)(could go higher, didn't test higher yet) without increasing vcore so far. It seems that 300mhz fsb is better, but should i sacrifice even more multiplier (9x right now) to obtain even more fsb? Thanks.

 

[Duvie]

OC the fsb as it will equate to better performance...it will increase the bandwidth and likely performance of pci and agp devices as well as the memory. However this can often be the limiting factor as many early boards chipset could handle very little in terms of fsb boosting....

 

[Xtasy]

Well i went by fsb and hit the wall somewhere above 160 to 166 ish. Running at 9 x 160mhz right now at 1.775 volts is stable. Wanted to hit 166 tho to max out the mobo settings, but maxed out by the cpu, even tho i lowered my multipliers even lower. Would it be better to run 7.5x 166 or 9x 160? Thanks.

 

[Kell]

I would take 9x160 myself.

 

[Duvie]

What is the pci speed at??? 160 without pci lock must be still using a 1/4 divider and means you are running 40mhz pci and 80mhz agp....could be a stability culprit...

I agree unless there is a 1/5 divider at 166fsb, I would drop down a multiplier to back off on the fsb to get closer to 38mhz pci...That is just my opinion though...BUT!!! If you can get a 1/5 divider at 166fsb then up that vcore up to 1.85 if you have to and go for it.

What kind of cooling to you have?? What are current temps??

 

[MangoX]

What are the default PCI/AGP speeds? I think it was 33/66 mhz... but I'm not sure. Can anyone confirm?

 

[Xtasy]

Let's see, the temps are kinda high(around 45 to 50 Celcius idle in mobo bios at 9x160 @1.75volts), it could be my cpu cause i could not remove all the arctic silver from the previous application and it stained it pretty bad. My cpu fan is a all copper svc golden gate (lapped with 2000 grit sandpaper to mirror finish) with a 40cfm ys-tech fan, (way too loud). Copper shim in there too. A thin layer of arctic silver 3 is applied. Do u think i should back down?

 

[Xtasy]

oh forgot to mention, my agp bus can take the pain because i'm running on a gf2 gts and my pci cards have proven to hit 48mhz on my old p3 setup, so these should not be a problem. At 160, my pci is 40mhz.