ok now my cooling issue is sorted and i now have an all in one monitoring the situation time to squeeze a little more out of it. i may have 2 sticks of 1 gb ram coming soon, but what i would really like to do is overclock the cpu a little, not too much mind just a little more, ok what should i do, i presume i have to tweak something in the bios where/what should i adjust and what should i really be watching out for?
With overclocking, you have two basic things you can adjust: the multiplier and the Front Side Bus (FSB). The Pentium 4 has a locked multiplier, meaning, you can't adjust it, so overclocking is relegated to the FSB. The Pentium 4's (and newer Pentiums) have a quad-pumped FSB. This is very important, or you'll furiously be trying to OC something you can't. The FSB's base frequency is multiplied by 4 for the real FSB, so a 400MHz FSB is 4x100MHz. Now the CPU's true speed is determined by the CPU multiplier and the base FSB. So 28 x 100MHz=2.8GHz. Some BIOSes have a special name for it, but you're looking for a 'Frequency and Voltage Controls' menu. What you'll be looking for may be called FSB, but you may also see 'External Clock Frequency'. This is what you want to adjust. Try a 5MHz bump. This might not seem like a whole lot, but, if you've got a high CPU multiplier, this will net a nice little OC. You're not done yet. Get ahold of [google]Prime 95[/google] and [google]Memtest[/google]. Memtest can be put on a bootable CD or floppy disk, and this will hammer your memory. Prime 95 will hammer your CPU in Windows if you run the tourture test. The goal is to have no errors in either program. You'll want to run Memtest for 3-8 hours to beat it over the head, and Prime 95 for a full 24 hours. Now, you can use your system with P95 running, and it should work fine. Okay, let's say you get some errors in either program. If DRAM voltage adjustments are available, you might bump this number up by 0.1V and try again if you're running into memory problems. For the time being, I'd leave the memory timings set to Auto. That's an indepth discussion on it's own. If your CPU fails, try bumping it up by the smallest amount available (typically 0.05V) and try again. For the P4, DO NOT go over 1.7V or risk fatally damaging your CPU. Temps: If you see your CPU temp hitting 60*C or higher under load, or worse--idle, you'll want to look into some better cooling.
does this look about right? i've increased the fsb from 133 to 138 and will now do the two tests and see how that goes, reports at the moment is it's running at 2.9ghz
first glances so far seems that the cpu is getting upto 58*c when running prime95, only run it for 3 hours, with no fails, will set it to run for a full 24 as soon as. it won't harm the chip running it for that length of time like that will it? and in gaming it seems to be running slightly cooler than normal, but will watch that more closely it might be just a one off!
No. Most people will not accept a CPU overclock as stable if you haven't run P95 for at least 24 hours. Overclocking is a great way to get free speed, but if your CPU isn't stable, there's no point. A few hours of stressing really doesn't do a workout that's needed. CPU's go through a lot more abuse when being tested for stock speeds, so you should give it a good thrashing to make sure it's stable.
