OC question

[sillyfresh]

so basically if i wanted to OC my P4 2.6 800 FSB my only option is to increase my FSB. I'm using a msi 865PE Ne02-ls and it came with a program called core center that lets me raise my fsb speed. so if i raise it in there that would count as oc'ing? i raised it a little and it says my cpu is running at about 2.8.

 

[trexpesto]

welcome, you are now one of the chosen ones.
Don't know about your motherboard, but some when you raise the FSB, it works across the board, i.e. for RAM, AGP, as well as CPU.
Some let you set a ratio between the RAM and CPU, and some can isolate the CPU FSB setting from affecting your AGP video card ("AGP lock") Most older boards, everything is affected, which can hurt your video card before it hurts your cpu, which is why people like the lock.
10% OC is considered good for those no-lock type of setups. Again YMMV, but better cooling on everything will help. That core center probably has some temperature monitoring for cpu? There are a bunch of overclocking guides you can look up on the net, and you may find info about your same mobo and/or cpu.

 

[MDE]

Yep, that's overclocking. Most people do it from inside the BIOS, but MSI's program will do the trick. The only way to overclock on a P4 is to raise the FSB, so keep cranking it until you see lockups or crashes, then back it down about 5MHz on the FSB and you should be stable. Prime95 is often used as a torture test to make sure an overclock is stable. An hour or two without errors will usually mean it's stable.

 

[OMG1Penguin]

MSI's CoreCenter is very useful on my motherboard (K8N Neo Plat, 64-bit).
It tells you your NB and CPU fan speeds, as well as guesstimates of CPU and mobo temperature.
It works a little easier than clockgen for me, as well as housing more information.
I set my "safe" overclock in the BIOS, and have clockgen to run on windows startup to stable settings.


In a nutshell, yes, FSB is what you change to overclock a processor (as well as the memory).