Unlocked multiplier

harakim

harakim

Big Geek
I don't know exactly what's going on, but I have a pentium 4 1,8ghz (Northwood, I think).
In my BIOS, I can change the multiplier to anything between 0 and 50. When I restart, it still says 18 x 100.00, but I set it to 24 and it won't boot Linux all the way. It boots the kernel I think and it gets almost all the way to booting SUSE, but it gives an error: Interrupt Handler synchronizing failed or something very similar. I had pictures of me changing it and booting up, but I can't get them off the digital camera and I had to give it back. Once my sister gets home I'll user her phone camera to show changing the multiplier (if it lets me again) and the error when loading linux.

It only lets me change the multiplier sometimes. It started when I changed the FSB to 200 mhz and it booted, but then crashed. When I restarted it was 8x multiplier and I noticed I could now change it.

P.S. I didn't put the Boot hyperlink.
 
Most processors have locked multipliers which you can't change. The only way you are going to overclock them is by increasing the bus speed. Then you have to bare in mind you are also overclocking the RAM and motherboard!
 
It won't change because the multiplier is locked on retail P4's. While some later Petnium 4's have allowed users to decrease the multiplier, it's more of a recent development. Your P4 is old enough that, short of getting an engineering sample, you're not going to be able to force an Intel chip to change it's multiplier. That's a trick you can pull with the Athlons by playing with bridges (A64's have multi's unlocked down, and A64-FX's have them unlocked both ways), but not with Intel.
 
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