First ever overclock - a question...

[SwedishChef]

I did my first ever overclock last week with the aid of the info on this forum. I realise that this is small potatoes on old kit compared to what some of you do but I was pleased anyway:

X2 4200 with Arctic Freezer 64 Pro
2GB Corsair 1024-3200C2
Gigabyte K8N Pro Sli (nForce 4 chipset)
BFG 7800 GT OC

I went from 2200MHz on the CPU / 200 FSB / 200 DDR to 2620MHz / 240 FSB / 188 DDR @ 1T at stock voltage all round. It seemed stable enough at 240 FSB and idles at 35c. I couldn't get it to POST at 250 FSB. I'm sure I could do better but I was looking for whatever safe o/c I could get at stock volts.

Bit annoyed that cool and quiet doesn't seem to work with overclocking. Scottish Power will be happy! The extra 400MHz cpu oomph is nice though - I played a bit of Silent Hunter 4 and noticed quite a difference.

It's been booting up and working fine for a few days now with an FSB of 240 but oddly last night I rebooted and it wouldn't post. As a quick fix I knocked the FSB down to 230 and then it posted straight away. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet but what might be going on?

 

[Banjo]

Hi SwedishChef,

You should try stress testing the CPU at ~2.6GHz, I'm using Prime 2004 ORTHOS to stress my Athlon 64 4600x2, it quickly picks up errors (for me, at least)

If you want to make sure it's not your motherboard chipset that's limiting the overclock (during that cold boot that you encountered) try setting the CPU to run at 250*9 or at 240*9.
If it fails at 250 then it could well be the chipset limiting the overclock.
If it works on 240 and you can stress test it without any errors, then it's a safe bet that the chipset is OK working at that frequency.

Banjo ;_;