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| overclocking ocz3500 with p4 northwood |
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Article: Allan "Zardon" Campbell
Achieving a "maximum" overclock is a long and arduous process and involves much hair pulling, bios changing and voltage changes. Many inexperienced overclockers just crank the CPU voltage to the highest in the bios, select an insane FSB and pray everything will work out. This rarely works. Northwoods are quite a delicate processor and many of you will have in the past seen the many articles detailing the "sudden overclocked northwood death syndrome" (SNDS) as documented on many a site at the time such as XBIT and reported on other sites such as theinquirer. Thankfully with the newer northwoods this situation is a much happier one and the chips are more resilient to voltage increases than before. There are many trains of thought on the maximum voltage you should pump into your Northwood, with some hardened overclockers saying 1.8-1.85 volts is fine with good vapochill or watercooling and those who like to live a little safer saying 1.65-1.7 volts is a more reasonable maximum voltage if you want a long and happy relationship with your CPU. For the purposes of this article I spent four days altering settings in the very comprehensive ABIT IC7 MAX3 bios and I found with this particular northwood any voltage over 1.65 was detrimental to overclocks. Im not alone in experiencing this im glad to say with my visits to many forums but after moving from my more familar AMD background I found this most unusual, the bartons I played with would happily overclock with relevant gains from 1.8 volts to 2.0 volts partnered of course with substantial cooling. 1.55 volts is a level which appears to work well with my particular CPU, any higher yields no noticeable benefits. As my northwood is "locked" all you are left with is the FSB settings, as this is primarily a ram article we want to work with 1:1 or syncronous settings. increasing the settings in 10mhz increases and running MEMTEST from a bootable ISO DOS CD after every setting to confirm memory stability I was amazed to find that at 2CAS this memory coped with up to 243fsb. this was at 8-4-4-2.5 to initially play with "safe" timings. Game accelerator is set to "turbo" / auto x4.
Now we have our maximum level for the CPU and ram in 1:1 time to tighten the ram up my safe levels of 8-4-4-2.5. 7-3-3-2CAS @ 3 volts was tested and memtest passed all tests, time to run some quick benchies. 3dmark01se/ pcmark02 / Sandra 2004
Ok so a pretty good set of results indeed but lets see if we can tighten this ram up some more.
243fsb 5-2-2-2CAS failed at 3 volts - back into bios upped to 3.2 volts the maximum this board can cope with, tested in memtest, rock solid with this voltage, time for some more benchies. Please be aware 3.2 volts is not recommended for many makes of ram so once you go over 3 volts this is classed as quite a dangerous level. If you are unsure dont do it !
3dmark01se/ pcmark02 / Sandra 2004
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