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Hi,
My current pc is AMD 1900+, ASUS A7A266-E ACPI BIOS Revision 1010, NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti, 2x256 PC 2100 DDR memory installed.
I'm kind of interested in what increases in performance I could get from OC this setup but am very new to this concept.
Any suggestion, ideas would be most welcome. Thanks.
If any more info on the current setup is needed then please say.
I presume that the CPU is a palamino (i dont think AMD make t-bred 1900+s) which means that you wont be able to overclock the CPU very much at all... i think the most i got out of my 1900+ was about 100mhz (ie 1.7Ghz rather than 1.6Ghz)...
The GeForce2ti is an old generation card, only supporting directx7 natively, which means you forgo things like pixel shaders and all the directx8 and 9 funky stuff which means that a) games are going to be slow and b) they arent going to look as nice as they could. You should be able to get a resonable overclock out of the gf2 tho, download a program called RivaTuner link and slowly increase either the Core clock, or the Memory clock (ie at 5-10mhz steps), and each time you increase it, run a program like 3dMark 2001 (40meg download if you dont have it already) to ensure that the new speed is stable, however you arent going to get amazing performance as it is only a gf2.
I dont know what brand your pc2100 ram is, but there is little point in overclocking that as you will get the best performace with running the ram and the cpu frontsidebus in sync (ie 133mhz)...
So overall, you wont get that much of a performance increase, and i would suggest that you look around for a cheap 2nd hand geforce3 or gf4 which will give your system a good performance boost for not much money :)
hope this helps
Mark
a palamino and an alimagik1 is about the worst combination you could have for overclocking.
no exageration.
so my suggestion for overclocking a 1900+ is... erm... don't. not without a new motherboard & chip which are more suited towards it.
Thanks for the prompt reply Mark, you are currect the cpu is the palamino version. You say that i might be able to get another 100mhz from the cpu! would this be done by changing the multiplier? it is currently @ 12.0x and only goes upto 12.5
The other setting that I think i can change on the advanced page in the bios is fsb, that is currently set to 133/33 and can be either moved up or down from there. I think the next step up is 134/40 from memory as i'm not in front of my pc right now
Is this how you went about getting your 100mhz
with mine it was a mix of both, as my motherboard (and ram) supported 166mhz fsb (with correct dividers so that the PCI and AGP speeds were still at default (33mhz and 66mhz respectively), however having no knowledge of your motherboard i am not sure whether your board supports this, i imagine it will only support 133mhz fsb while retaining pci and agp clocks at standard.
Anyway, as for the multiplier, this is going to be 'locked' at 12x, and in order to 'unlock' it you have to join up some of the bridges on the CPU which is rather fiddly but is possible (i've done it to a couple of CPUs but it takes time and patience heh)...
So, i feel that the only way to overclock your CPU would be to increase the front side bus, from the current 133 upto something like 140 which will give 1680mhz, and see if it is stable, as the palamino cores are very poor overclockers you may have to increase the voltage (vCore) that is fed to the CPU, but there are two things to worry about -
a) too much voltage - make sure you increment up in the smallest steps you can as you dont want to kill your cpu, and
b) heat. palomino cores run quite hot at default speeds and volts, so increasing the voltage fed to them will increase the heat being pumped out of the CPU, so make sure that you monitor these levels and try to ensure that they stay below 60-70 (preferably 40-50) as a high temperature can shorten the life of hte CPU (and too hot - it 70-80+ will kill it..)
anyhow, the number after the fsb (ie 133/33) is the speed that the PCI is running at, obviously increasing this can lead to instability as you are forcing everything in the PC (such as sound card, network card, harddisk controller etc) to run faster than it should. my PCI bus is currently running at 40mhz (and AGP at 80 as it is always twice the PCI clock - unless the motherboard locks it, which your one doesnt) and i havent had any problems, but each system is different so see whats what. and have fun experimenting :)
mark
I have an AMD Athalon 1800+ and its basically the same chip just different stock speeds and multipliers. I've been able to get my FSB up to around 152 wiht the voltage at 1.85v and it barely ran any tests and i was having stability issues but it only reached temperatures of around 40-45C and like alot of other people here have said i would jsut keep it stock unless you desperatly need all the performance you can get.
I think I'm in the same boat i can get the fsb up to 154 but it is just not stable even with a voltage increase. Plan B is to get a new MB & faster CPU as long as it's not to expensive.
my old 1900+ wouldnt even do 1630mhz :(
The maximum for my chip was arounf 1.73-1.75 ghz , at the maximum my mainboard would go.