Just did my first overclock of an XP 2200+

Agent Smith

I just got this XP 2200+ system not too long ago. I purchased all of the parts for the system retail.

here is the specs

AMD Athlon 2200+
Giga-Byte GA-7VAXP
ATI Radeon 8500 LE (3.3ns RAM so its at 265/310)
Samsung DDR333 CAS 2 RAM w/heat spreader.
Onboard sound, lan, raid.
3 Firewire Ports
6 USB2.0 ports
Western Digital 80GB SE HD
Toshiba 16X DVDROM Driver
Lite-On 401248 CDRW with firmware pushing it to 481248

Ok I just put all of this together and right now I unlocked the XP2200+ and have it running at 166FSB and a 11.5x multiplier (I tried 12x but i had some probs when i went into the bios to look around...weird graphical glitches and such.)

Ok now here is my thing.

Im running it at 1.920 Ghz which is a good increase since its normally at 1.809 Ghz. My VCore is going between 1.75 and 1.78 as I have it set to auto adjust as power is needed to the CPU and my temps when running it at full load doing SETI is between 45 and 46*C

I just wanted to know if this is within acceptable ranges or if I need to try sumthing else

I know my power supply is adequate. I bought an Antec Truepower 480 for this thing

btw....this mobo doesnt let me manually set the voltages and the ram has had to be knocked down from CAS2 to CAS2.5 so not really a big loss

Agent Smith

just upped the FSB to 169 as the onboard stuff didnt like the 170FSB since it raised the Mhz on the PCI bus to 34.

so far its stable

can anyone tell me if my temps are good though as they still apply as well as my vcore

Agent Smith

so no one has a clue at all eh?

JavaFox

The temps are just fine. As far as I am concerned, as long as you aren't in the 60s, you're good. Now, I'm really quite intrigued by the way you're overclocking. Typically, you don't see overclockers running with such low VCORES. :> Kick it up to 1.8V and see if you can't hit 2GHz.

Agent Smith

thanks java

ill give her a try in a just a min

Zardon

I recommend you keep it under 55c, as java says, bump the core volt up a little at a time and run a 100% CPU intensive test (such as rendering or rippings MP3s) while monitoring temperatures. this is a good way to check stability under full loads. better sacrificing a little speed for stability.

Agent Smith

Thanks

actually i raised the voltage up to 1.8 as recommended and it wouldnt boot up at the 12x multiplier

a friend of mine was telling me to let it have a couple weeks or so overclocked so it would burn in and it would overclock better.

however sumthing has come to my attention that I wasnt aware of

the Samsung DDR333 CAS2 ram i have is an overclocked Micron DDR266 CAS2 stick of ram.

so at DDR333 its only running at CAS2.5 and I believe that to be the cause of my problems when trying to step up the multiplier higher and I have written the company that sold us the stick of ram and told them that i am not happy with the deception and that they will send me a stick of Samsung DDR333 as promised or I will be letting yahoo (which owns their webspace) know about how they are defrauding their customers and then will proceed to contact samsung as well as micron and tell them about it as well.

Think it will work?

Agent Smith

oh btw just thought id mention that i had ran SETI@Home for about 10 hours straight last night after the overclock and went to sleep and all and just let it keep running and it was running fine at 45C

Shaith

mid-40's is fine, 50's is a tad warm, 60's is awful close to bad news. If you're going to continue your overclocking effort, you should invest in heatsinks for the north/south bridges, controllers, etc on the mainboard, quality ramsinks, decent fans with high CFM ratings, a cpu cooler such as alpha, swiftech, or go with a quality peltier and secondary power supply for it and use water cooling to dissipate the heat off the peltier.

Running SETI@Home is really NOT a valid load test. It doesn't run at high priority, it runs at low priority, which means just about any system process can take cpu time away from it. The distributed.net client can be configured to run at a higher priority, but that's still not the way to go.

Get something that conducts burn-in tests, renderings, etc - you want a full 100% load sustained for a decent amount of time. There are plenty of offerings out there that will help you do this. Or run botmatches in UT2K3 for a good hour or so - that'll heatsoak a CPU quite effectively. Monitor your readings carefully during and following the tests. Trade stability for speed.

Agent Smith

You mean do the instant action thing in the main menu?

I play UT2K3 alot on this machine before and after the overclock and it always runs well

DriveEuro

Those are nice temps.....even considering that you are overclocked 100mhz.....

Agent Smith

thanks

im just hopin that I can get the new ram in from that company and push it up to 2Ghz

that to me would be heaven

DriveEuro

How much did you pay for your 2200?

Louie6666

You may want to try this proggy, Its called CPU Burn & kills my computer, when no other application can. Its the best for stability testing your cpu, that I've found so far here is link for it

http://users.ev1.net/~redelm/cpub4gi.zip

Agent Smith

I paid 161 for it retail with the HSF and all but that was almost a month ago so not sure how cheap you can get em for now.

thanks Louie...downloadin that prog and giving it a whirl to see how hot it makes my cpu get

Shaith

That works - put as many bots as you can in there and run around shooting things.

Or run the benchmark utility.

Or use 3dmark2001 in looping mode.

Agent Smith

I just did a bios update for my motherboard and it dropped my vcore voltage down to 1.67v according to the Giga-Byte hardware health utility and its still rock solid

im going to be getting some corsair DDR333 CAS2 ram.

think that would let me bump up the multiplier?

Agent Smith

hmm I have the new ram and i still cannot boot up at the 12x multiplier

can anyone give me anymore tips or things I can do?

I mean I know this thing should be able to do it

right now its only running at 40c

it should really be able to push up higher wouldnt you think?

G@MeBoY

Set multyplayer on the board (that means dissable auto detect) and also set the voltage directly on board (if possible). But leave your PC open, maybe it will not work so spare your self of oppenin' again... Maybe your CPU just can't handdle it, not all CPU's can be OC-ed...Even thoese that can, some go further, some not...

Agent Smith

actually thats just what im doing

ive set the multiplier up to that on the board using the dip switches and the voltage has to be done in the bios....how safe would it be to put the ram up to?

I also keep hearing that I made a mistake in getting just 1 stick of 512RAM instead of 2 256 sticks

tparker

I am surprised you got the 2200 to overclock much it is the worst of the overclockers in XP line I have read many a instance where 5% overclock is the max for this Cpu It will vary from chip to chip so you got a outstanding one I wouldn't push it too far especially the voltage . your friend is right about letting it burn in I usually let mine run for a week straight before i overclock any and then slowly move it up.The case has a lot to do with overclocking My Lian-Li has four fans and a good CPU fan is essential to life of your ProcessorThe best memory in my opinion is the Mushkin cas 2 2 2 .Corsair is pretty good memory also i have a XP 2000 and i am getting close to 11,000 madonion benchmarks in version 2001 se.
Asus A7V8X Motherboard
XP 2000 Cpu
DP ATX PowerSupply 400 Watts
512megs Mushkin PC 3000 Cas 2 memory
Msi Geforce Four MS-8870 TI-4200 128 mb ddr sdram Videocard
Nvidia 40.32 Drivers (new)Thanks to DriverHeaven
Western Digital Special Edition 8mb buffer 7200 80 gig harddrive
Seagate 20 gig 7200 Slaved drive
Sony Cdrw
Sony floppy
Lian-Li PC-65 Atx case
NEC Diamondtron FE991SB 19 in.Monitor
Microsoft Optical mouse
Standard keyboard
Rounded Cables

RIV@NVX

Very good program for stability test is Super PI calculator (and you have nice output - 2MB of PI for example). You can download it here.

Agent Smith

thanks guys

right now im thinking its just the motherboard since every other component is good (well other than the vid card now but thats a diff story....long story short....NEVER BUY ANYTHING FROM WWW.BUYAIB.COM)

anyways i cant set the FSB up hardly at all no matter what so i think its the onboard devices not liking it too much. so ill have to be happy with this overclock since its rather stable

next thing im doin is since the vid card went bad gettin the radeon 9500PRO when it comes out so hopefully that is soon