Newbie Overclocking Issues

[TechKnight]

Okay, I've decided to overclock my PC due to peer pressure on these forums. I have a retail P3 667Mhz slot 1 processor on an Asus P3V4X motherboard. It's suppose to run at 133Mhz bus and as you all know, the P3V4X supports bus speeds up to 166Mhz. I am using a GeForce GTS. I am also using some generic Micro Q PC133 128MB SDRAM. I tried to overclock to 800Mhz by upping the bus to 160Mhz. After I exit BIOS, it doesn't reboot. There is simply nothing on the screen. However, if I hit the reset switch once or twice, it will boot at 800Mhz. Windows and games such as Diablo II and Starcraft seems stable at that speed even for several hours. (I have not actually had any problems which I didn't normally have when running at stock speeds) The only thing is, after a while, after I shut down, it freezes during shut down. The voltage is at 1.65V. If I am to continue running it at 800Mhz, should I up the voltage to perhaps increase stability? Is running at 160Mhz FSB bad for my components? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Some other details... memory is running at 2-2-2. Temperature is averaging around 53C after couple of hours, is that too hot?

One more thing, how do I know what stepping is on my processor? Where do I check?

 

[Stallion]

While I'm no expert I do know that the PIIIs that use the 133FSB are not as good of O/Cers as the 100mhz FSB units. I would imagine that 150 would be close to the max you can go but if it will run at 160 you just might need to bump up the voltage a bit to get it to be stable. With a FSB of 160 you PCI cards will be runing at 40mhz ,with the 160 1/4 speed choosen, which is what I think fried one of my NIC cards. That too might be a factor for scaling it back to 150.

just my .02 cents.

 

[AndyHui]

160MHz is a very high FSB...you might want to run the RAM asynchronously at 160-33 (127), or you can try placing a heatsink on the ICS clock generator, located at the bottom of the 4th DIMM slot. Many overclocking problems with high speeds have been solved that way as the ICS chip runs very hot. Some form of cooling always helps.