max ram voltage/HD overclock

[Dee99]

I'm trying to overclock an Athlon Xp 2200+. I have 2 questions that I would appreciate some help with.

What is the max voltage that one can safely take DDR2100 ram. The default voltage is 2.5 volts, but my mobo lets me set this up to 2.9 volts.

Also, what is the highest safe overclock on a hard drive. I know the PCI bus is supposed to run at 33 Mhz. How fast can you overclock the bus to without frying the HD. I have a western digital 120GB special edition drive.

Thanks.

 

[aka1nas]

You don't want to overclock your PCI bus, it really won't make anything important faster and will cause instability often. What motherboard do you have? Many motherboards have enough PCI divider ratios that you can raise the FSB w/o running the PCI bus out of spec. To be honest, I don't know if running the PCI out of spec will damage the hard drive at all as it is usually on a controller hooked up to the southbridge of your chipset. You could experience data corruption though, which isn't a whole lot better.

 

[Dee99]

Thanks for the help. I'm running an older mobo, an Epox 8k7a. It supposed to run at 133*2 (266) fsb normally, but i'm pushing this at 155*2 (310) right now and hope to take it up to 160*2 (320) fsb. I've done a little research and found out that the pci bus speed is not "locked." However, I'll look to see if I can use a 1/5 divider instead of a 1/4 divider to keep that PCI bus in spec.

If anyone has any expertise on max ram voltages, I'd appreciate some insight into that as well. I don't really care if my rams life is shortened since I won't be using it for more than about 6 months to a year, but I don't want it to cook before then.

 

[aka1nas]

Also keep in mind that you ought to run your RAM and FSB in sync for decent performance. So if your PC2100 won't overclock much, then don't bother with FSB overclocking on your setup. As for safe RAM voltages, I don't really know and would like to get a good answer myself.