I am building my first computer what tweak do you suggest?

[pitupepito2000]

Hi,

I am building my first computer and of course I am excited, but I was also wondering what is the best tweak that you would suggest to me. I only want tweaks that would boost my performance without making my system unstable. Thank you very much all you computer wizards.

Ahtlon XP 1800+
MSI KT3 Ultra
ATI Radeon 8500LE 64MB
256MB Mushkin PC2700 SDRAM

 

[dwifuzi]

hehe... fun fun fun..
Great board and also great price/performance chip. BTW, what kind of heat sink fan do you have? If you haven't gotten one or you have the retailed amd Heat sink fan, your chance of tweaking it is slim. Anyway, do you know anything about unlocking your chip? first, put all the hardware together of course. Once you got that done. turn it up and let it sits for .5 hour or an hour. Then thru your BIOS, check how hot is your chip. If it is between 40-50 degree celcius. You can jack it up some more. If you have an unlocked xp1800, the multiplier can only go up to 11x so... decide your FSB. YOu can do 4:5 to increase performance. FSB set it to above 150. Pc2700 should be able to get the FSB to 175 or above.
If it's not stable, clear your CMOS. It's hard to explain everything in just like this. Read your manual is a good thing. hehe...

 

[pitupepito2000]

What does unlocking mean? and Is there any place online that is very detailful about unlocking and overclocking a computer?

Thanks

 

[Soulkeeper]

unlocking is short for unlocking the clock multiplyer
which is a portion of the formula for determining the clock of a system
example: 133x11 = 1463mhz
in that example 133 is the front side bus and 11 is the clock multiplyer
when AMD and Intel make their chips they like to lock the multiplyer in the factory or set it to the one they want
with an unlocked clock mult you would be able to up the clock multiplyer
example: 133x11.5 = 1530mhz or 133x13 = 1729

you can't change the clock multiplyer without first "unlocking" the processor here is a link to a howto and info

you can also up the fsb which has pros and cons
you got good memory there you might wanna try running the fsb and mem at 166mhz speed for starters after lowering yur clock mult (unless you feel yur chip can handle it)
you might wanna look into voltage mods for the vcore and maybe the mem
I am not sure if that MSI board lets you go over 1.85 vcore
there are mods for that if you search google

 

[pdo]

First system please don't try anything drastic. Unlocking would be one of then. You'll regret once you messed up.

 

[Crucial]

Decide whether or not you have the money to replace that processor if something happens to it. Overclocking does you NO good if all you end up with is a non working computer.

First tweak? Read, read, and then read some more. You can do serious damage if you don't know what you are doing. Go do a search on google for overclocking athlon and read everything you can on how to overclock. If you do some research first and don't go all crazy you will be happy with your first attempt.

 

[Soulkeeper]

Ohhh yeah good points
i forgot about those
heh heh

 

[Soulkeeper]

yeah csaddict is right
read lotsa articles and forum threads

 

[BuddyAtBzboyz]

For your reading material I would suggest doing a search on google for a forum which has a section specifically for your motherboard. I own the ECS K7S5A and I can't tell you how much help it was to get advice from people who owned the same board as me.