Sunrise089
Senior member
I decided to postpone a much-desired Athlon 64 and PCI-e upgrade until January or so, and therefore decided to try to get some additional performance out of my 2.0ghz Northwood on a Gigabyte motherboard. I researched Northwood overclocking online using a couple of links from Anandtech and then popped into the BIOS, only to find my MB offers only FSB control and nothing else. No CPU voltage, no RAM voltage, no FSB : DRAM ratio changing ability (set to 3:4). The only other control besides FSB is the ability to make AGP and PCI speeds independent of the FSB, which I enabled.
Just to see what would happen, I upped the CPU to 2.1 Ghz and loaded Windows, and everything seemed stable in very casual use. I then backed off the overclock back down to 2.0ghz and downloaded and ran Prime 95 and Super Pi (I cannot run 3dmark03' or CPU mark 05' on this PC) and they both ran stable for several hours.
At stock speeds and 100% CPU usage my temps as reported by Hardware Sensors Monitor are: MB 25, CPU1(??) 26, CPU2(??) 58....at idle they are 25/25/43 respectively. These seem high for a Northwood - but my case is originally a Dell 2300 series case, so cooling probably won't be very good.
Only good feature about this system is the quality 425 watt PS, don't worry about that.
My question is this: what overclock should I expect with these VERY limited controls, and is any overclock safe? Since any changes I make will be without increasing voltages or altering the FSB:Memory ratio can I safely up the speed at all? Any overclock will be nice, and I know I can just stress the CPU and see if I get errors or not, but I just wanted to get an outside opinion as to whether or not I should be making any changes at all. Thanks for your help.
Just to see what would happen, I upped the CPU to 2.1 Ghz and loaded Windows, and everything seemed stable in very casual use. I then backed off the overclock back down to 2.0ghz and downloaded and ran Prime 95 and Super Pi (I cannot run 3dmark03' or CPU mark 05' on this PC) and they both ran stable for several hours.
At stock speeds and 100% CPU usage my temps as reported by Hardware Sensors Monitor are: MB 25, CPU1(??) 26, CPU2(??) 58....at idle they are 25/25/43 respectively. These seem high for a Northwood - but my case is originally a Dell 2300 series case, so cooling probably won't be very good.
Only good feature about this system is the quality 425 watt PS, don't worry about that.
My question is this: what overclock should I expect with these VERY limited controls, and is any overclock safe? Since any changes I make will be without increasing voltages or altering the FSB:Memory ratio can I safely up the speed at all? Any overclock will be nice, and I know I can just stress the CPU and see if I get errors or not, but I just wanted to get an outside opinion as to whether or not I should be making any changes at all. Thanks for your help.
