Need help OC'ing a PIII 500

[cpmer]

How much could i oc a p3 500 with a stock HSF. Also how do i oc one since ive never oced a cpu yet. I dont know what kind of mobo it has. Im pretty sure it has 256mb of pc133 ram

 

[Trashman]

Hopefully you have a BX chipset motherboard, you should easily do 733MHz with that cpu, just bump the fsb from 100 to 133MHz
I guess thats assuming you have a slot-1 motherboard.

 

[cpmer]

im almost postive its bx motherboard. im not sure about slot 1 or not. Where do i go to bump up the fsb and how how can the temp go before it becomes dangerous.

 

[MisterChief]

Time to upgrade!

 

[CrackRabbit]

If you have a corporate built system (Dell, HP, Gateway) or an Intel branded mobo you can forget about OCing it. They simply dont have the options in the bios or jumper settings to do so.
Now if you dont fit the above conditions the way you overclock is simple, you just raise the FSB speed from 100 or 133 where it is at, little by little, until the computer won't boot into windows then back it down some and run prime 95 and memtest86 till you find a FSB speed that is stable in both. If your board has voltage controlls for the cpu and memory a slight bump may help achieve higher speeds. About overheating your CPU you shouldnt worry, I dont think you can OC an P3 high enough to cause it to overheat.

 

[wisdomtooth]

Originally posted by: cpmer
How much could i oc a p3 500 with a stock HSF. Also how do i oc one since ive never oced a cpu yet. I dont know what kind of mobo it has. Im pretty sure it has 256mb of pc133 ram

You need to find out the following:

- Which P3-500 you have. If you have an older "Katmai" P3-500 with 512K L2 Cache, it is NOT very overclockable. If you have a newer "Coppermine" P3-500E with 256K L2 Cache, you can crank it up to 666mHz very easily. Run something like Sisoft Sandra and it will tell you how much L2 it has.

- Which motherboard you have. You need a motherboard that lets you set the FSB bus speed and PCI divider. To overclock a P3-500E, all you have to do is crank up the bus speed from the default 100mHz up to 133mHz and set the PCI divider to 1/4, and that will force the CPU to run at 666mHz. It was devilishly fast for its day (geddit?), heh.

- You also need a video card that can tolerate AGP bus speeds up to 90mHz, because AGP is also overclocked when doing 133mHz on a BX board. No worries if you are using a i815 board.

HTH.

 

[Tiamat]

you might get more of a performance boost if you buy more ram.

 

[cpmer]

I found out that the mobo is a i-440BX. Do u change the FSB in bios? because i looked in there and couldnt find anything.

 

[Deskstar]

You did not reply to indicate if your mobo came in or was part of a Dell, Gateway, etc computer. If so, you can look in the BIOS but it does not exist in those specialized mobos.

 

[RanDum72]

The best way to squeeze the last ounces of performace from your setup is first:

- upgrade the memory to at least 512mb
- sell your 500mhz PIII
- get an Upgradeware Slot T or Powerleap slotket adapter (adapts socket 370 CPU's to Slot 1).
- Get a Tualatin based Celeron (goes up to 1.4ghz). These CPU's are cheap and they run at 100mhz FSB so no messing around with OC'ed AGP timings or PCI/memory dividers.

The slotket/CPU upgrade should run around $50-60. If you can sell your PIII for around $25, that leaves you like $25-30 out of pocket. Thats not too bad.