Unable to overclock a Celeron D, please help

[shortbigman]

Hi there,

This is my first post here in Anandtech foruns, altough I'm a reader of the Anandtech site for more than 5 years.

I've recently upgraded my old AMD Duron to a new Intel socket 775 package. Since I was on a budget, I bought a Celeron D 326 (2.53 GHz) and a ECS P4M800PRO-M motherboard. It was a good deal at 50$ for both.

I had in mind to overclock my Celeron, but for reasons I don't know, I'm unable to do it. If I change the bus speed from 133 to 166 Mhz, the computer woudn't even boot. If I make a more conservative change to the FSB, for example, to 140 Mhz, it doesn't boot Windows, even if I give the CPU more voltage.

What could be my problem or what am I doing wrong? Is it the motherboard that is rubbish? Heat doesn't seem to be the problem, nor memory, since I have 1Gb of DDR-2 667.

 

[shortbigman]

Anyone?

 

[o1die]

I would look for memory settings in the bios. The cpu may overclock fine, but the memory may be your bottleneck. If possible, I lower my memory settings so when I overclock, the memory speed is correct. For example, when running pc3200, instead of setting it at 200, I use 166 when overclocking.

 

[myocardia]

Your ECS motherboard must not have a PCI lock. That's going to keep you from booting at anything higher than a 138 or so FSB. Try looking around in the BIOS, with the system at stock speeds, and see if there's a setting to "lock" the PCI bus at 33 Mhz. Also, you'll want to lock your AGP or PCI-E bus at 67 for AGP, and 100 Mhz for PCI-E. If it doesn't have locks, though, you'll just corrupt the data on your hard drive.

For the memory, see if it can be set to run asynchronously. If it can, it's already running faster than the processor's FSB, so you'll have to back it down to 133. That way, it will be running at the same speed, and will have quite a way to go, before it needs more voltage or higher latencies.

edit: To overclock, you need to take everything that's running on "Auto" settings and make them the same settings, but in manual mode (except for making the RAM run at 133 to begin with).