Overclocking an old Northwood

TheRyuu

Diamond Member
Dec 3, 2005
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Since I'm moving to water cooling on my main Opteron Rig, I'm putting my SI-120 in my older Northwood P4 rig.
The only overclocking I've ever done is on my Opteron (right now 250x10 and I love it :D), so I'm kinda verturing out into the unknown here (not so much in the overclocking standpoint, just I've never overclocked a P4 before).

It's an old 2.66ghz P4 Northwood, so for starters, what would be the max amount of volts I would want to put in it (like safe amount, like it's 1.5v for Opterons, or around there) what would it be for the northwood.

Second, what would the max temp be on the northwood that I wouldn't want to go over. (probably be a bit hotter than my Opteron).

Third, I've searched on the forum a little bit (so don't say I havn't ;)), and I seached for "northwood overclocking" and didn't find too much stuff. So you can't say I didn't try.

Thanks for help.
 

stevty2889

Diamond Member
Dec 13, 2003
7,036
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You'll likely be able to reach somewhere around 3.2-3.4ghz with it, I wouldn't go higher than 1.575v. My 3.06 hit 3.45ghz, and my 2.4c made it to 3.1ghz. Temps will be higher than your opty, but northwoods run cooler than prescotts, so you probably won't have any major temp problems. You are safe up to the mid 60's, higher than that and throttling will kick in(probably somewhere around 67c around 3.4ghz with a higher Vcore), but with an SI-120 I don't think you'll have any temp problems.
 

BlingBlingArsch

Golden Member
May 10, 2005
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in my experience u dont need to play around with the voltage since northwood overclocks quiet good. 3.1-3.2GHZ would be the aim if i was u. and like stevty said, watch temps and stop whatever ur doing when they start going over 65° under load.