overclocking issues on 3000+BARTON

[willaby]

My system has the following specs:

WinXP Home Edition SP1 (with all the latest updates)
AMD Athlon XP 3000+ "Barton" 2.17 GHz processor (currently @ 200x11 to make it 2.2 GHz 3200+)
1 Gig of Corsair DDR-RAM
120 Gig Western Digital HD
Chaintech 7NJS ZENITH Mobo
Chaintech Vid Card with NVIDIA® GeForce4™ Ti4800SE GPU and 128 MB VRAM
Creative SoundBlaster Audio PCI 128 Sound Card
Lite-on LTR-401255 40x12x48 burner
Samsung DVD drive
(I have the DVD drive and burner both on IDE 2 with the DVD reader as master and burner as slave)

The mobo has pheonix BIOS which allows me to modify the FSB speed, multiplier, and voltage to the CPU. I decided to have a little fun and started to play around with these things.

The original clock speed on the CPU was 2.17 GHz, and the FSB was set to 166 mHz which means the multiplier was set to approximately 13 (even though in the BIOS it said "default").

First, I changed the FSB to 200 mhz, and downed the multiplier to 11 to make the proc register as a 2200 mhz 3200+. It worked quite well, with no heat or stability issues (that's actually how it's set at the moment). Then I changed the multiplier to 11.5 and left the FSB as it was, to give me 2300 mhz. Windows appeared to start just fine at first, but then crashed after a few seconds (what? XP has a blue screen of death?!?). I decided that I was being too ambitious, so I changed the FSB back down to 166 mhz and upped the multiplier to 14 (for a total of 2324 mhz). Silly of me, I thought the lower FSB would have made a difference. It didn't. As a matter of fact, my comp wouldn't even make it to windows, it crashed and burned. SOOOOOOOOOO I restarted and it wouldn't even perform POST or make it to the BIOS, so I was forced to pop the CMOS battery and reset the BIOS. Fun stuff.

Now, it seems to me like I should be able to make those gains no problem, but obviously I can't. Is there something that I should do, like increase the CPU voltage (it runs at ~1.6V) if I want my good 'ol Barton to run in those ranges? Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

[Omardeth]

well the top end on these cpus no matter what they are rated at is about 2.3/4 on air cooling . you have the high end already , so there isn't going to be much headroom . you could try to raise the voltage but i think you are already about as high is it will go with air cooling

[Strawbs]

Voltage increase can sometimes help with overclocking, but as Omardeth rightly pointed out ...the top end for Barton overclocking is around 2.3-2.4GHz on air cooling.

Try here for hints\tips for your board\chipset.

[willaby]

Thanks for the help, guys, I think the website you pointed out will be quite useful.

[willaby]

UPDATE:

I upped the multiplier to 11.5 again, but this time I changed the Vcore to ~1.7. It seems to work, windows booted without problems (except for the little "the system has recovered from a serious error" message...which hasn't affected anything yet, as far as I can tell). Now my CPU is running @2306 mhz. Awesome. I think I'll leave it at that for now...

[willaby]

OK, OK...

Not long after I made the previous post, it crapped out and crashed when I pressed the "back" button in IE 6. I think I'll just stick to the default voltage and 200x11 for the processor for now, heck I already have top 'o the line performance.