New to overclocking - having problems - please help

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I've been trying to extend the life of my ageing Athlon64 3700+ and so have been having a bit of a go at overclocking it, albeit without much success. I've heard this CPU is a good overclocker and so am keen to stretch its legs a bit.

To start with, I had problems with the AGP (yes it's an old system!) and PCI bus frequencies increasing as I upped the FSB. After a fair bit of reading, I've managed to set these both to constant values in the BIOS and so that is sorted. However, the problem I have now is with the memory (2GB OCZ Platinum DDR1 running at 2-3-2-5). Whenever I increase the FSB, the memory clock will also increase. Because of this, I can only raise the FSB to 220Mhz (2.42Ghz CPU clock) before the system decides it no longer wants to boot when restarted. And even at 220Mhz it's a bit temperamental. Once it's running it's as stable as anything, but I wouldn't mind taking it a bit faster.

I've heard I need to adjust the 'RAM divider' to achieve my aim. But for the life of me I cannot find anything by this description in my BIOS. I have the ECS KV2 Extreme motherboard with a BIOS v1.3d (latest).

Can anyone help? What should I be looking for?
 
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I have an option called 'Memory index value'. This is set to 200Mhz at the moment.
 
Have taken it down to 166Mhz. Would I be right in assuming that I will now have to set the FSB to 234Mhz for the RAM to return to 200Mhz? Or is this completely wrong?

Have changed a fair few options but am having a number of problems. The highest I can get the FSB before the PC will no longer boot is about 235Mhz. I then have to decrease this further to 229Mhz before Vista will boot, and even at this it is unstable. It will load right up to the shimmering Vista logo thing and then will just reboot. I have tried adjusting the multiplier, Vcore voltage, and timing on the memory, but none seem to allow me to boot Vista with an FSB over 229Mhz.

XP will load fine with FSB set to 235.
 
The max stable I can get at the moment is 225 FSB without any RAM divider. This gives me a CPU clock of 2.48Ghz

I can get it to just about boot the BIOS with an FSB of 240Mhz and RAM index set to 133Mhz. That's with only one stick of RAM though. With two in it's out of the question.
 
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tim80bwi said:
Have taken it down to 166Mhz. Would I be right in assuming that I will now have to set the FSB to 234Mhz for the RAM to return to 200Mhz? Or is this completely wrong?
Click to expand...

Yip that's correct.

How much have you increased the vcore by?
 
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