Overclocking newbie seeking advice.

[mcbiff]

I've never dabbled with overclocking before but I'm tempted to start, let me set up the scenario.

I have the following:

• A P3 700E cb0 (SL45Y) packed on April 5th this year
• A Globalwin FOP32-1 HSF ordered
• An Asus CUSL2 motherboard

I know I can get somewhere with it as I've booted to Win98SE at 933 with the retail HSF, however Q3 hung on execution. So I'm guessing a little more voltage should do it. My questions are:

• Can I expect 933 (stable) out of this CPU? If so, at what voltage?
• What should I think of when going for it?

Also, I'm a bit worried that if it crashes it will corrupt all my data or something like that. What are the odds of that happening? I would think that if it crashes all I have to do is reboot at a lower speed/higher voltage? This part really worries me, and I would be very grateful to whoever sets it straight.

TIA.

 

[mcbiff]

Thanks for the advice. You're saying I shouldn't worry about data corruption? But what if the CPU is "doing something" (not a very scientific term ) with some data when it crashes, won't I risk it then? I guess I could stand losing like a download or something though, what I don't want is a corrupted HDD requiring an FDISK to set things straight. Do things like that happen when the PCI bus is not overclocked?

Also, I should mention that I have two case fans. One in the bottom front blowing in and one behind the CPU sucking out.

 

[spamboy]

You can up the voltage to 1.85 safely, and many people are willing to go to 1.90, although that's a little high for my "conservative" approach. Wait until you have the heatsink on and you're sure it's working right, then up the voltage to 1.85 and boot at 933. If all goes well, start going even higher. If you are almost stable at 933 with 1.65 volts (standard voltage), you might even get 1GHz out of that puppy with 1.85 or 1.9. But it sounds like all it will need for 933 is 1.7 volts.

Will you lose data? Probably not. The only thing that could cause that would be if you have an old crappy hard drive and you put the PCI bus over 33MHz. At 933 (133 FSB), you're PCI should be perfectly at 33. There is no risk whatsoever. Start going higher and you overclock PCI and AGP, and then you are risking those parts, but chances are your CPU with get unstable before you get high enough to hurt anything. Many people can run the FSB at 150 without too much trouble. Unless your hard drive is really old, I say push as high as the CPU and memory will run stable.

Good Luck! Let us know how it goes.

 

[mcbiff]

Both my HDDS are fairly new (less than 1 year old) IBMs. I'm not planning on going anywhere above 933/133. I gather from what you've said that my data should be perfectly safe, right? If yes, I'm gonna go for it. Thanks a lot.


If anyone else should have anything to add it would be most welcome, of course. I'm still new at this, remember?


EDIT: Oh yeah, the voltage was set at 1.65v for my "test" @ 933.