Help overclocking Athlon 2500

[eaglefan]

Hello. Some questions for all the experts here. I have an unlocked 2500 with an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe, 1024 corsair value select ram, AIW 9600 Pro, 2 80Gb sata hard drives in a raid 0 array, all housed in an Antec Sonata case with a rear 120mm exhaust. Here come the questions. I bumped the fsb to 400mhz with no problem, and ran Prime 95 for 2-3 hours with no errors. I know it needs to run longer, but I thought I'd ask for help before I did anything too crazy. First, am I doing anything that will bork my system too bad? I'm not totally opposed to replacing a component or two, but I don't want to fry my whole system. Also, my temperatures during Prime 95 topped out at 53C. Is this too hot? I have a cooler master copper heatsink with aluminum fins. I can add another 120mm fan to the front of the sonata - will this help? Any other suggestions, concerns, or bits of wisdom would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. Almost forgot - the multiplier is at the default 11x, so it's running at 3200 speeds.

 

[myocardia]

Good for you, man! Were you able to do that on default voltage? Um, 1.65v of vcore, in the bios, that is. If you were, I wouldn't doubt that you would be able to run at 2.3ghz with around 1.75v, although with the ram you have, you would need to change the multiplier to 11.5, at 200fsb. And yes, most people say that a system is "Prime stable" when it will run at least 12 hours, error and warning free in Prime95. Good luck.

edit: You might have to add a 120mm fan in front, to be able to run it at 2.3ghz. If you don't want to buy one or just add one, you could always overclock it first, then buy the fan if you need to, but your temperatures at 2.2ghz were fine.

 

[eaglefan]

Thanks man. My vcore in the bios is set to auto, and looks like it's hovering between 1.68 and 1.69. I don't really want to run it any higher than 2.2Ghz, so if all these readings look fine, I'll run Prime 95 for 12 hours to test it out. As always, any other thoughts or suggestions would be great. By the way, how much do you think that front intake fan would help? Also, those temps are socket temps in mbm, since my mobo doesn't support diode temps. Are those still ok?