oc'ing a old p3

[touchmyichi]

Hey i have a p3 850(8.5 x 100). I was wondering if its a good or bad idea to oc a p3. I'm only going to be using it for 1-2 more months since i'm upgrading to a 2400+ athlon. Right now my p3 is at 89F-95. On sandra it says its at 100 though...wierd. How high do u think i should aim for?

 

[EKAtBzboyz]

well up the fsb a coulpe at a time and see
if it doesnt post (a time will come when it doesnt) just go and reset teh CMOS (make sure u figure out how to do this BEFORE overclocking lol)

when you recover from teh failed post, go to the speed it didnt post at, and raise the vcore by the smallest amount possible and try again

keep doing this until you either
1) run out of vcore (cant raise it any higher)
2) no matter how much you raise the vcore, you cant increase the frequency

run prime95 torture test to test stability and max temperature (atleast for 4-5 hrs, if it fails within that time its not stable, if it doesnt fail, let it run for up to 24hrs, if it doesnt fail id say its pretty stable)

raising the ram/pci/agp voltage (its probably bundled together) will probably get you anohter 1 or 2 frequency increases maybe

 

[JSSheridan]

Go for it. I won't hurt unless you increase the vCore too much. I have a slot 1 700 oc'd to 933 right now with 1.85 vCore running a temp of 56 C/132 F (Running TeAm Folding@Home). Increase the FSB slowly until you can no longer boot into Windows, then back down a few MHz on the FSB. Once you OC your system and can boot into Windows, run Prime95's Torture Test overnight to confirm that your system is stable. Good luck Peace.

 

[touchmyichi]

thank you, well i hope lady luck is with me. I'll be happy if i can get around 950-1000 (thats resonable rite?)

 

[touchmyichi]

cool i'm at 935, everything seems well, 1ghz might not be that bad of a goal, i don't want to go to crazy though....

 

[bizmark]

it probably depends on how late of a revision your core is, but I've got an 850MHz P3-based Celeron (exact same chip, just with half the cache) (I bought it in January BTW so it's probably one of the later versions of the chip) and it ran fine at 133FSB (1133MHz) (ran 3DMark and Prime95 torture test indefinitely) last winter. But it started hanging up when the weather got warmer so now I've backed down to 116FSB (986MHz) and it works like a charm

Temps were never very high (I think around 40C under a full load, and <30C idle), and I couldn't control the vcore with my motherboard so it was always either stock or .05V higher due to the automatic voltage control. I'm using a cheapo $5 CoolerMaster HSF..... and my case back then was a POS with 0 fans besides the PSU fan. So overall you've probably got a lot of potential, esp. if you have better cooling than I did. Now my new case has a lot better airflow, and it's gotten cooler again, so I bet I could bump it back up to 1133MHz.... hmm maybe I'll try it soon

 

[obeseotron]

I had 2 p3 700e's, one did about 900, the other 980. The 850 is trickier because it won't possibly overclock to near 1133, which would give you proper PCI ratios (1/4 for 133Mhz FSB), assuming you have a late model BX or newer p3 chipset. If you have a BX, you will also definitely be overclocking your agp bus, which usually isnt a problem for gf1 and gf2's. I had a friend who ran a gf1 at a 100Mhz AGP bus for over 2 years, before he finally upgraded it the CPU/Mobo, the card still works fine. A nything newer than the BX supports a 1/2 divider so this would be a non issue.

 

[bacillus]

Originally posted by: obeseotron
The 850 is trickier because it won't possibly overclock to near 1133 .

o/clocking that chip to 133fsb wasn't unheard of with the last cDO steppings!

 

[touchmyichi]

yeah it seems like p3's oc like crap though. Sigh....I want that 2400+.... I'm going to raise the voltage on this when i have time. Thanks for all the helpful posts.

 

[EKAtBzboyz]

yeah its true some dont overclock very well
my friends p3 733 (133fsb) will get to about 825 (150 x 5.5) or so at max voltage (1.85 i think)

back in the day we searched everywhere for a way to unlock the cpu, since i heard about the golden finger or something along those lines with p2's, i figured there might be something like that for p3's....how wrong i was lol

 

[rogue1979]

Actually, the later cDO stepping coppermine overclock relatively well. Most of them seem to get close to 1200MHz. Earlier steppings had trouble reaching 1GHz. My daughter is running a cDO Celeron 850@1190MHz, 1.90v 39C under full load.

 

[touchmyichi]

wow thats pretty fast, but I think celery's oc better than p3s. Do you think a 5% voltage increase would be safe? Or should I just do 2.5% and stop.

 

[rogue1979]

I say 1.90-1.95v is OK if you are running cool.