Celeron 400 on a BE6-II

[AceT]

Hi.

I'm having some 'fun' with my Abit BE6-II board and a Celeron 400 and need some help.

If I try to push the FSB up to 85MHz or above the machine will sometimes boot, sometimes fail. When I soft-reset the machine I get a BIOS checksum error (with a loud farting sound!) and a request for a boot disk in drive A.

I'm running the latest BIOS version which flashed with no problems.

A hard reset now will allow me to enter the BIOS and reset the FSB down one notch (to 72MHz or whatever) and the machine now boots.

This is the second thing - the machine boots Windows 2000 via a drive on the HPT ATA66 controller and this is fine. However my second drive (on the first ATA33 controller) has been scambled!

I'm obviously doing something wrong... any ideas?

This is not a heat problem... I've bought a GlobalWin cooler, the CPU is running at 35C.

Thanks.

 

[birddog]

My old celeron 400 would not overclock well. On my Asus P3V4X, I could get it to run at 75mhz, but nothing more. My Tyan Trinity 400 would not even post at 75mhz. From what I've read, the 400's were not good overclockers, some clocked well, but most didn't.

 

[Lord Gwynz]

I have an Abit BE6-II and a Celeron/400 as well, and it's currently running at 570 using 95mhz bus setting. It can do 600, but I get CRC errors under winzip, it's probably heat related. I hear it's not too uncommon for the 400's to hit 600 if you're willing to bump up the voltage. I have mine at 2.3v.

On a related note, I also had a Celeron/500 going at 570 for awhile using the 75mhz bus speed, and the Celeron/400 at 570 blew it away in all benchmarks, so it may be worth the effort to try for the higher fsb. Just make sure you set your pci & agp dividers accordingly.

 

[AceT]

So, if I want to run the FSB at 85Mhz what are the best settings for AGP / PCI?

My graphics card is a Matrox G400 (not overclocked at present) which is suppose to be good at overclocking. Will either of these settings explain why the second drive goes AWOL?

I had my Celeron running at 600MHz last night but it failed to start to boot Windows 2000 - I got the POST screen up, past that and then the machine locked up before the boot lader kicks in. I'm sure it will run at 500MHz, I just need to understand what is going wrong.

Also with the machine running at the stable 450MHz I ask Windows to reboot, got a blue screen with a 'Bad Call' error, then a two second pause, and then it rebooted. Any ideas on this? Is all this related? The error has now happened a few times.

My machine was running fine until I had re-install the o/s due to a driver problem. Have I just got a bum install (I know that this is moving off topic but I'm not sure how much is related!).

Thanks.

 

[Lord Gwynz]

I'm not sure how you would set the pci/agp at 85mhz, that's sort of a oddball bus speed. Some harddrives may experience corruption running way above spec like that if you're using 1/2 for the pci. Using 1/3 doesn't seem so hot either since you'll be running the pci below spec so you won't be running at optimum performance.

Since you made it to 600, have you tried the 94-99 mhz bus speed settings? At least with those settings you won't be missing out on much using the 1/3 and 2/3 dividers for the pci/agp settings (or 1/1 for agp if you think your card can handle it).

Also you didn't mention what voltage you're using. Try 2.05v-2.2v, and if your cooling setup is up the task try up to 2.3v.

 

[AceT]

Thanks for that... I am running at the default voltage of 2.0, but I will try to up it.

I'm still confused about the hard drive though... anybody have any ideas on that one?

 

[Assimilator1]

What make & size hard drives are you using?

 

[AceT]

On the ATA66 controller (which runs fine and stores Windows 2000) I've got a Maxtor 20gb 5400rpm.

On the ATA33 controller (used for storing data, MP3's etc.) I have a Seagate Medalist 6.4gb. This is the only drive that has a problem when I overclock.

Thanks for the interest.

 

[Assimilator1]

Hmm ,odd I would of expected the Seagate to of been OK on an overclocked PCI bus ,my 2 are .
BTW At 85Mhz make sure your your PCI divider is at 1/3 ,yes your'll lose a little performance but your HDD's will work OK & they won't scramble your data at that speed either!

 

[AceT]

Thanks... I never realised that the PCI divider also had an affect on the IDE controllers.

Any ideas about the BIOS problem and the 'farting noise' when I try to reset at any speed above 74Mhz?

 

[Assimilator1]

Have you tried upping the cpu voltage?

As per Lord Gwynz suggestions?

 

[Assimilator1]

Have you tried upping the cpu voltage?

As per Lord Gwynz suggestions?

BTW ,what spec RAM have you got? PC ???

 

[AceT]

I've now upped the CPU voltage to 2.2 and the FSB at 95MHz (I think!), giving a CPU speed of 575MHz... not too bad considering that Celeron 400's are suppose to be poor at overclocking.

How high can I safely take the CPU voltage? At 2.2 volts I was able to boot at 600MHz but the machine locked up when putting it through a few checks.

The RAM (256mb) is PC100 - one stick in generic and one is by IBM.

 

[Assimilator1]

If you have the std heatsink don't exceed 2.2v ,otherwise 2.3v should be OK.
Your RAM's OK
Is it stable at 575MHz? ,a good speed if it is

 

[Hyper99]

Correction, 6 x 95 = 570mhz
6 x 97 = 582mhz
There is no such thing as 575

 

[BuddyHolly]

600 is pretty rare for the 400's. I had mine up to 616 or so, but it took a lot of cooling.