P4 Northwood Overclocking

[-mb-]

Okay, all I need is a little advice in overclocking my 2.4 Ghz (800 FSB) Northwood. (D1 revision)

I am not a "hardcore" overclocker, but now I have a Zalman 7000AlCu cooler with Arctic Silver 5, and 1Gb of Geil DDR500 memory, I would like to get somewhere near 3.0Ghz.

I know this can be done, and much higher overclocks are possible with better cooling.
Naturally, for a laugh, I put it at 250FSB straight away, needless to day, this did not work. biggrin.gif

Most importantly, my default vCore is 1.58V. I gather this is bad...so can one of you guys please tell me:
- how high is it "safe" to go on the vCore with this kind of cooling?
( I don't want to significantly shorten the processor's life)
- how high am I likely to need to go to approach 3.0Ghz?
- is my Thermaltake 420W PSU good enough? (http://www.thermaltake.com/purepower/w00089.htm)

[ANZAC_ELITE]

Try using the auto overclock in the bios (I'm sure your board has it) and try 20% that should get you up around 3.2, if it crashes on reboot due to unstable oc no biggie just hit reset and lower the oc.
I have been up to 20% with auto oc it gives me 3.85 and that was on stock cooling so with your Zalman you should be safe.

I believe your multiplier is locked at 16 so 250 x 16 = 4GB, that is why you had failure. Do you have the latest bios for your board? that enables use of higher cpu's? 200 x 16 = 3.2GB try that, or 187.5 x 16 = 3GB

My advice is to try the auto oc first, when you have established your upper limits you can then return to manual oc in the bios or you may like to try AI Booster from the Asus site, it should be in the utilities section of your boards d/load section. This program allows you to oc from within windows, personally I tried it and didn't like it, you may find differently. Good luck.

[-mb-]

My multiplier is 12. (12x 200 =2400)

Yeah, I'll work with the booster. Thanks for that.

[oralpain]

Make sure you lock the PCI/AGP clocks.

Try giving the memory more voltage or lowering the ratio.

I would really avoid going much past 1.6-1.65 vcore.

[BenW]

I have a P4 2.26Ghz 533FSB and just tryed overclocking it yesterday with a fanless thermalright XP120.

Stock voltage is 1.5 and multiplier is 17 so stock is 17*133 = 2266

Tried a few different fsb settings, going up in quite big lumps and got to an fsb of 160ish before i stopped. Haven't tried to go any further but im sure it'll go further. RAM is crucial DDR400 so thats no holding me back until at the moment.

Only reason i stopped there is that memory multiplier (Not sure what its called) is set at 2.5 so mem is currently running at about 403Mhz. I'll change it down to 2 and try going further some time

With the fanless xp120 idle temp is 32 ish depending on ambient and load just now whilst playing farcry was 51. Ambient is probably about 22

[Clstrphbc_donut]

I wouldnt use the "auto overclock" feature. Really does suck, from first hand experience.

Slowly up your CPU's FSB, leaving the voltage on auto. I can get 3.42GHz unstable on mine, but 3.3GHz stable. I can get 3GHz with 3200 ram but theres currently 4000 in there to get and keep it stable over 250FSB. Whats strange is that it idles at 29oC at 3.3Ghz, which im not complaining about.

P4P800 and a 2.4C (800FSB Northwood) should clock like hell.

EDIT to answer your questions

I was using a 350w PSU when i was running at 3GHz so your psu should be fine
250FSB was fine for me, 277FSB+ the board or CPU maxed out.
As said, im not sure what Vcore i was running as i kept it on auto.

[-mb-]

Okay, that's interesting, thanks.