Is unlocking my Athlon 1700 XP necessary to get a good overclock?

[GtPrOjEcTX]

So far on my Shuttle AK31A I can overclock the bus up to 146 without increasing the voltage. What would unlocking it do for me?

 

[Executor]

It would allow to overclock while keeping the fsb standard. If you have really good cooling you can overclock the FSB and the multiplier. In general FSB overclocks perform better when eqaulling a multiplier clock. This is because with FSB increase memory and other system components are overclocked also. Dividers can take care of this problem pretty well, though.

 

[Rahminator]

Even though I prefer multiplier to fsb overclocking, I try to overclock the fsb just a tad. I don't raise the fsb too high because while regular PCI and AGP devices can take the beating pretty well, hard drives are very picky and while it might seem they work at like 145 fsb (just a number I picked as an example, don't know how accurate this is and have no proof) for a few months, after that they misteriously fail. Have you seen how many people are reporting hard drive failures lately? Of all my friends who are not tech-savvy and don't even know what overclocking is, I have yet to hear about their hard drive failing. In this place though, there is a lot of enthusiasts who overclock a lot and they there's all sorts of problems because they most likely went too high and after some time the device failed. If you really want to overclock your fsb, you should get one of those promise 66 MHz PCI cards and hook up your harddrives to it so they run in spec while the rest of the system is happily chugging along on a high fsb.

 

[markrb]

I have a Western Digital 14gb Hard Drive and if I put my pci bus up over 37Mhz it will corrupt in just a short time.
I have no choice but to reduce the fsb and reformat the drive, it's that screwed up. It hasn't died on me though and
thats through 4 corrupts. It sucks becuase my P3 750 can do at least 900Mhz stable, but I can't trust my drive at anything
over 825Mhz. What has saved my butt all 4 times is that my IDE drive is just a working drive for DVD rips. I have all my
programs and OS on my SCSI drives that have been bullet proof for 3 years. They are only 4gb each, but I sure do trust them
a whole lot more then my IDE, especially when OCing.
I am getting an XP next week and plan to unlock it. I will up the fsb a few points, but not much.

Mark

 

[Wind]

<< So far on my Shuttle AK31A I can overclock the bus up to 146 without increasing the voltage. What would unlocking it do for me? >>


Unlocking will allow u to change the multiplier on the CPU. XP is harder to unlock. Most ppl here still left their CPU locked & O/C thru FSB. At 146 FSB, ur PCI bus is at 36.5 Mhz which is fine. Most equipment is able to take around 40 Mhz. Some sensitive components take around 37 Mhz.

Components lifespan will be shorten w/ O/cing...but the arguement is if it lasted for more than 3 years...wouldn't u be happy ?

About tht HDD corrupting data...it really depends...so far most HDD will take 37 Mhz of PCI bus.

 

[Egrimm]

Well, I've never had any problem with hard drive corrupting. I have had my Celeron 333 oc'ed to 416 (83Mhz fsb/ 41,5mhz pci) and I've never had any problems with corrupting on the Western Digial 10Gb drive in the 2 years it has run. My Xp1600 , which isn't unlocked, runs 157Mhz fsb / 39Mhz pci and there doesn't seem to be any problem with my 40Gb IBM Deckstar 60Gxp drive either.