[KevinACrider]

Today I did my first real overclock. It's an older MSI K7T Turbo 2 mother board with an AMD Athlon 1000mhz processor. Stock it ran at 61* idle. From what I understand the Athlon's ran hot anyway. I have it overclocked to 1.3ghz and that's as high as I can go. I did it by raising the multiplier (i think?) in the bios to x13. It went to x15 but for some reason x14 made it run at 500mhz and x15 made it run at 1000mhz. It runs stable right now at 1.3ghz at 64*. Only a 3 degree increase in temperature.

I'm wondering if I get some better cooling methods am I able to do anything else to get it higher or is that as high as I can go?

 

[iampoor]

yes you can.

www.newegg.com

 

[KevinACrider]

Well obviously new stuff will be better. I'm just asking if there's anymore I can do to this machine to squeeze more speed out of it.

 

[hks85]

Im going to try and explain all this the best i can so i hope it doesnt sound too complicated. the best method ive found so far is to start off with everything de-clocked. the main things you are dealing with are the

-core
-ram
-FSB
-HT

i start off with everything at their lowest multiplier and raise my FSB 10Mhz at a time until i find the limit. Back it down a little to improve stability. next raise the ram divider until you see its limit which is usually no more then about 15% over stock. then comes the core, raise the multi on that just like you did the ram followed by the FSB multi. i dont know anything about the older Athlons but this is how ive done mine. also keep in mind that the 4 parts your dealing with will fit like a puzzle. what do i mean?

lets say you have your bus speed up to 300Mhz, core multy at X10, HT at X3, your computer speed would be as follows.

core=3Ghz
FSB=900Mhz

lets pretend the FSB maxes out at 1Ghz, so you would need to drop the bus down to 250Mhz, change the HT multi to X4 which would then make your speed...

core=2.5Ghz
HT=1.0Ghz

to get that core back up in the 3.0 range you would need to change the multi up to X12 assuming it was avalable.

:::TEMPS:::

if your looking to get better temps, make sure the heat sink is as clean as possible. if you have a better fan, throw that on there. thats about all you can do unless your willing to spend some $ on a better one.

 

[ouroboros1827]

OMG IT"S GONNA SPLODE

It does run hot. What is the load temp? Bound to be in the 70C range O_O. Very hot. 30% OC isn't bad at all, by the way. I'd get a bigger fan/more fans/reseated heatsink. (Could be you just need to clean the heatsink and reapply thermal goop...the cheap stuff does dry up and lose contact after years).

 

[repoman]

That processor is fine at 70C, in fact it's running cool if it hits that temp at load. My Athlon 900MHz non-overclocked does well over 100 (water boils immediately upon touching the heatsink, no other temp monitor) and has been since 1999

 

[KevinACrider]

Under a full load for 45 minutes it only got to 69.1 degrees. I did take the heat sink off and clean it up real well. It was pretty nasty. I added a second fan blowing about 2 inches in front of the first with the case off. I'm ordering a new case next week with a case fan in it. There was only a little bit of thermal goop on the heat sink, not a lot at all. A glob about the size of a dime. I'll look into a better heat sink and fan.

hks85, thanks for the write up, I appreciate it but on my motherboard I don't have all those options. I only had 5 options and the only one I adjusted was the one at the bottom. It had deafault and then a range from x5 to x15, with steps every .5. That particular setting is maxed out. The others I left alone.

 

[The Duke]

Have you/can you increase the FSB say from 100 to 133 or 133 to 166 and then tweak the multiplyer accordingly?

 

[KloroFormd]

I had a Socket A Athlon (Thunderbird core) that ran 82c full load stock...