Overclocking P4

[Polyonic]

I have a real crappy PC and I want to get the best performance possible out of it, for a year or so. Here are the stupendous specs:

Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz (Northwood)
Gigabyte GT M/B 865PE chipset
512 (2 X 256!) Dual Channel PC3200 2.5-3-3-8
Inno3D Geforce FX5500 (270/400) 256MB
80 GB WD H.D.D.

I am definately gonna upgrade the H.D.D. and the ram, as well as the GFX card, but to what?

I a noob at this, so bear with me
- How far could i push the CPU, could it reach 3.8 stable on air cooling?
- what r the risks of water cooling?
- Do the northwoods have any advantage over the prescotts?
- Is it really a good idea to buy an AGP GFX card, or just buy a new system?

 

[Lithan]

What games do you play? Check any recent benches you can find. For example, the benches I've seen seem to show that a 256meg 6800 plain beats all ATI offerings in COD @ 1280x1024, and comes very close to the 6800gt's and ultras. And probably 70% of my gaming is cod @ 1280x1024... so a plain 256meg 6800 would be good for me. If I played a game that likes ATI cards better, I'd buy something ati. Ram? You can spend 150+ on a gig of tcc- stuff that will let you run 1:1 @ 2.5-3-3, or you can get some value pc3200 for $75 and use a divider.



There's no telling. Contrary to what people say, there isn't any way to know what a cpu can do without actually testing it. With your cpu's entire code (manufacture date, stepping, etc) a reasonable guess based on averages could be made. But 3.0 northwood is nowhere near enough info for that.

Leaking is the worst but can be avoided if you are careful. Forgetting to turn the pump on can be a problem, but most systems these days should just shut off if they cpu overheats.

They perform better /mhz in most tasks that aren't related to SSE instructions and hyperthreading.

Depends how good a deal you can get on the card and when you next plan to upgrade.