500Mhz FSB For 3200+ ATHLON

[Kevinpc50]

I have a 3200+ Xp with a biostar M7NCD Motherboard with a NForce 2 Chipset, with 400Mhz Kingston RAM. Ive never done any overclocking before. Does anyone have any advice for me. I want to buy new RAM and have a 500Mhz FSB. I dont know much about settings like voltage and memory timings. I Just need a little advice.

[Dominos]

Find the FSB in the BIOS, increase it by, say 5 mhz. Boot up and run a stability program such as SuperPi 32m/16m. If the system is stable, then increase a couple mhz FSB again until it's unstable, then you increase the mem voltage, up to 3v is safe if your worried about your system, although 3.2v isn't harmful either really. If the system still is unstable, then increase chipset voltage (to the max, no need to save voltage here) and up the CPU voltage a little to say 1.7v, increase the volts until it's stable. When it's stable start to increase the FSB again. When more volts wont help you are probadly at the edge of the motherboard or the CPU. Then you can start to tweak memory performance and such. And ALWAYS check the temps! Everything above 70 isn't good, the best acording to me is to keep below ~65*C full load. Good luck with OC ;)

[sai]

Why you want it to run 500mhz FSB if you haven't got a clue what are you doing there ?

[I²K]

Biostar? Forget it...

[boshi]

Your motherboard will be the limiting factor. I own the second fastest motherboard ( the Abit NF7-S ) and it wont go over 410 FSB. Try the DFI Lanparty 'B' and you'll have a chance.

[Lithan]

Really, FSB doesn't do as much as intel tried to convince us it did. The main advantage of it is more memory bandwidth... Nice for benches... but you'll never notice it in reality. And in all honesty... there's no point in overclocking for benches on your motherboard. People who want to overclock for benches generally buy their hardware with that in mind. That's not to say you shouldn't try pushing FSB to get a little extra performance. But you wont get close to 500FSB and you shouldn't bother trying. 420-440 FSB would be quite an accomplishment. And frankly, I wouldn't recommend buying memory just to get a few more FSB. I'd just give your stuff a little voltage... tighten the timings as much as you can stably, then start inching FSB up as high as it will go stably.

Ram timings should be something like 7-3-3-2.5 or 8-3-3-3 or the like. The first thing you want to tighten is the second number... but most ram can't run that at 2, so don't be suprised if you can't post or get alot of errors there. If it does 2, great. If not set it back to 3 and then try the 3rd number at 2. Then try moving the final number to 2.5 or 2 (0.5 less than what it was). Do this to find the lowest stable setting. Then the first number (the big one) is interesting. Most people find setting this to 11 gives the most performance. Some like 5 or 6 and some like 8, 9, or 12. 11 is generally considered best on NForce2 boards however.

ALWAYS TEST USING MEMTEST86 FROM FLOPPY WHEN DOING THIS! MEMORY ERRORS CAN SCREW YOUR HARD DRIVE TO HELL IF YOU TRY AND LOAD WINDOWS WITH THEM HAPPENING!


Ram voltage... Anything up to 2.8 is nothing so don't worry about boosting it that high. I've ran 3.1v 24/7. Others have run 3.3 or even more 24/7. I'd say whatever the max your motherboard offers is, that should be fine.

[Çhrist0ph]

To get 500ddr fsb youll need to get a DFI Lanparty B or an INFINITY and some BH5 or OCZ EB ram. But...by then youll have spent so much money, you could of just bought a brand new video card:p: