I recently was handed a pentium 4 socket 478 computer with a 1.7ghz processor. i already upgraded the ram to a gig and overclocked it. This rig will only be used for a DJ/Server computer at my fraternity house and now also has two 160GB in RAID. So whats left is a pretty pathetic processor, BUT it allows you to overclock it up to 2.4Ghz which is bareable. So my question is if i purchase a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz socket 478 400Mhz fsb will i be able to overclock That past 2.4Ghz? that is the max offered that fits the fsb of the motherboard. i am hesitant to purchase bacause the highest option i have to overclock and the fastest for sale are the same speed. Thanks, this is my first time using this forum and hope to use it from now on.
Those are official specs. I don't know which core you have, but the Northwood core was known to overclock pretty well. That was the second P4 core, the first being Wilamette, which was a Socket 423 exclusive. I highly doubt you'd be stuck to 2.4GHz. If it was a 3.2GHz chip, your ceiling might be a lot lower. I had a 2.4 chip that did 2.8GHz with air cooling. One thing to keep in mind with older motherboards is that the FSB and PCI/AGP clocks were tied to one another and used dividers to keep the PCI/AGP clocks close to their native 33/66MHz operating frequency. It may not affect you, but if it does, some PCI devices, such as RAID controllers can be sensitive to higher freqencies, which could be a major issue with this setup.
