Complete OC newbie. Please explain some things. :)

DaBlade

DaBlade

DaBlade

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12 Feb 2006
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Hello.
I've never overclocked before, nor did I ever think I would, but here I find myself lacking in CPU speed for some operations (Compiling software mainly). It just takes too long.
I quickly glanced through a few OC guides, including the one stickied on this forum, and appearently, I need to increase some multiplier thingy. (Yep, I probably sound like a big dumbarse right now.).

Anyways, I only wanna boost the CPU a couple hundred MHz. Perhaps even boost the RAM a bit if possible.

Here are my system specs:
AMD Athlon XP Barton 2600+ (1917MHz)
Asus A7N8X-X mobo (nForce2)
768MB RAM (One 512MB kingston chip, and one 256MB chip I don't know the make of. Probably twinmos or something)
Fortron/Source 400W PSU
Using the CPU fan that came with the CPU (Boxed)

(Probably not relevant, but hey...) :
PNY nVIDIA GeForce 6600GT 128MB
MSI 4x DVD burner
LITE-ON DVD player
19" TFT Monitor
Using MEPIS GNU/Linux as my operating system.

Can anyone explain to me, in laymans terms, what I need to do? I don't wanna boost the CPU a lot, maybe up to 2.2GHz or something.
(Don't flame me or anything. Everyone's a newb at one point. ;))
 
on the althon xp's all you need to do was go into the bios and then increase the FSB by 10mhz i would say each step till u find it coming unstable, then drop by 5 from the last stable speed. If u find that you do not get much speed increase before it falls over itself then u can increase the voltage on the core, from stock to i had mine at about 1.7 i think, but that depends on what your cooling is like as you will have to be watching your temps. to do this use mbm5 or whatever its on now :). you may be limited in ure oc by the dodgy ram of unkown origin. but good luck!
 
I kinda feel insecure about just experimenting... Is there some safer way of doing it?
And is there some "safe limit" to percentage of speed/voltage increase?
 
well as its an old barton its not even so important that the temps are kept that low, the max temp given by amd on those processors was 90 degrees, so it is safe for it to be hitting 60 under max load. Also i can tell you no more than to try and increase things slowly and eventually it will top out, if you have dont this slowly then it should not cause any damage as it will be only slightly too high for it. you will then probably have to reset the bios to the next most stable point u got to and then you can stress test it with things eg prime, occt etc and this will tell you if it is rock solid. good luck hope it goes well.
 
Okay, so I just increase the multiplier until the heat hits 55 degrees?

(And I don't have lm-sensors installed so I can't monitor CPU heat or anything like that inside the running OS.)

(And just to get everything clear and consise so I don't screw up, please write down every step one step at a time.)
 
well if you can go out and download cpu temp monitoring software eg mbm 5 or whatever as it will save u lots of time, get cpu-z also to check the clock speeds etc in windows.

now you can start to oc, go into the bios and increase the multiplyer (if possible didnt think you could with the old athlon xps) if you find you cant then

increase the fsb of the cpu by increments of about 5-10mhz , this will let you see what the effect is and to check the oc is actually working without pushing too high. after each increase you can check if it is stable (but really only needed when it starts to get near the limits) once you have found that it becomes unstable, you can reduce the fsb by 10mhz or however much you feel is reasonable to keep it stable. test it again and check the temps in windows.
 
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