P4 2.4b & PC2700 RAM OC'ing Questions

[Trey22]

FTP (First Time Poster)...

I tried to do my homework and looked at my mobo manual spent a little over 2 hrs looking around the forums for answers to my questions, and unfortunately still feel like I'm on the OTHER side of the chasm.

Help building a bridge would be greatly appreciated! Apologies for all the info, I just thought too much would be better than not enough.

PC Specs:
MSI 845G MAX mobo, v1.0, AMIBIOS v 3.31a
1GB Generic PC2700 CL2.5 RAM (bought at FRY's for less than 100 bucks).
P4 2.4b OC'd to 2.75 (40C idle, close to 60c full load)
Stock Intel HSF & ASIII Thermal Compound

Other standard stuff: WD 80GB 8MB HD, 16X DVD-ROM Drive, 40x12x48 CD-RW Drive, ATI 9800 Pro (Stock Speeds) (for now!), Hercules Fortissimo III Sound Card, Floppy Drive, Zalman Fan Controller for the 6 intake, 1 outtake fans.

Down to the point now... when I OC'd my CPU to 2.8, system hard locks when playing BF1942. Standard apps work fine, like IE, playing MP3's, docs, and watching vids/dvd's at 2.8.

Fuzzy Logic 4 shows my CPU voltage going anywhere from 1.47 up to a max of 1.49v. I thought this was supposed to be stable!?

CPU-Z shows my memory at 1:1. In my BIOS, I didn't find a place to change that.

Am I experiencing lock ups because my CPU voltage is too low at the high overclock of 2.8 and/or because my memory timings are off/incorrect? What's the formula for synching both up, if possible?

Here are my current BIOS settings:

DRAM Frequency is set to AUTO, other choices are 200, 266, 333.
Configure DRAM Timing by SPD set to ENABLED, and all the timing settings are grayed out. When I chooseDisabled, it opens up access to the following settings: CAS Latency (2), RAS Precharge (3), RAS to CAS Delay (3), Precharge Delay (6), Burst Length (8).

Frequency Voltage Control:
Spread Spectrum is Enabled.
CPU FSB Clock MHz is 153
CPU VCore Adjust set to NO, if I click YES, gives options starting at 1.5v all the way up to 1.8v.
DDR Voltage: 2.5v
AGP Voltage: 1.5v

If more info is needed, I'm sure I can find it somehow.

Thanks in advance,

Andre

 

[Trey22]

1 more thing, how are the PCI/AGP bus speeds affected by overclocking the FSB? I read this mobo is supposed to lock those, but really doesnt'! Wouldn't want to fry my 9800 that I spent months saving for.

Thanks again,

Andre

 

[Kroffty]

Well When I overclock a system I do the cpu first and then push the ram to see what it can take.
Set your memory to 200 or 333 I forget witch is the devider that slows the ram down, up the voltage, relax the timings. This will ensure your ram is not being stressed while overclocking your cpu.
Now start overclockng the cpu run up the mhz until the system becomes unstable and then up the voltage on the CPU to see if you can stableize it. Use memtest86 to test the system.Or you could use prime95.

Once you find out what your max overclock is then drop the voltage down on the Ram and start increasing the memory devider I.E. 200, 266, 333 .
If your stable there then start increasing the timings until your getting errors in memtest86 again and then increase the voltage to see if you can get NO errors in memtest.

Hope this helps