Overclocking the FSB on a AMD Athlon anyone?

[magtab]

I have a AMD Athlon classic 600MHz 0.18Micron chip on MSI K7 Pro motherboard with a GeForce2 GTS .I have successfully overclocked the FSB to 110MHz so my chip now runs at 650MHz. My concern is what damage if any is this doing to my system. As i have heard that when you overclock the FSB you up the PCI Bus causing potential damage to video cards and hard disks. The system seems stable at 650 but i would sure like to now what speed the PCI bus is running at If there are any overclocking experts out there who could advise me.

 

[Techwhore]

here's the breakdown. Your PCI clock runs at 33 mhz, so at the default fsb of 100 it's at 1/3 which is 33. At 110, you're not pushing it too hard. So at the same 1/3 divider, it's running at 37 mhz. I'm sure your mobo allows for divider adjustments, so you could change it from 1/3 to 1/4 = 27.5 in the bios. I would say to leave it at 1/3. Most PCI cards can handle up to about 40 and some can go over. Obviously your cards are handling it fine if it's stable. The damage that's being done is more likely going to go unnoticed. The lifetime for computer parts is the range of 5 - 10 years, depending on the part and quality. By overclocking anything you diminish that life span somewhat but what you're doing is hardly pushing your parts. It's when you start pushing your cpu from 500-1000 and upping the voltage that really does the harm, but again, that's only cutting life in half. So my understanding is that your cpu will die, or something to that extent, in 2-5 years. In 2-5 years i won't have any of the parts i have now anyway. I hope that helped.

 

[magtab]

Ok thanks for your help much appreciated.

 

[bolomite]

If you want to push your CPU farther, but without screwing up your PCI and AGP buses by upping the FSB, then get yourself a Golden Fingers device (GFD). The Afterburner by Outside Loop Computers is good, so is Northwind GFD rev. 2 or the newer rev. 3. Might as well squeeze every ounce of performance out of your Athlon as you can! They are excellent chips.