Overclocked p4 Northwood

Dyewitness

Dyewitness

Dyewitness

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Hi all

I have a P4 Northwood 3.2g overclocked to 3.6g.
The cooling i have is. 2 front fans sucking air in, a Zalaman ultra quiet cooler, 120mm silent case fan and an artic cooler for my x800.
I am running the CPU at stock voltage and my Crucial Ballixtix pc4000 is running at 2.8v. I am just wondering. am i correct when i have my memory ratio at
1:1. my present CPU idle temp is 26 degrees. Could my northwood be raised to 3.8ghz or even 4??

comments appreciated

c
 
well the idle temp is not so importan, as u need to know the temp at load, try prime torture test and then check temps.

but it does sound like you could be pushing it a bit further. good luck.
 
If you are doing 3.6GHz on stock voltage I think that's pretty good. IIRC my old 3.2C could get to 3.73, but with a fair voltage bump (1.7V possibly). RAM should be fine 1:1 up to 250MHz, so long as you have set the timings slack and it's getting enough juice. So just keep pushing up your FSB, and when you start getting instability up the voltage (keeping an eye on temps, use MBM5 or a similar program to get an accurate reading). As iraiguana said, load temps are important. So run something like Prime95 or S&M for a few hours to get an idea of temps/stability.

What motherboard are you using? May have to up the chipset volts if/when you start getting close to 250MHz FSB.

Good luck!

Suman
 
I'd use the 5:4 dvidier to start with so that the RAM is running at a lower speed than the CPU FSB. This will ensure that the RAM won't be playing a factor when trying to fnd out how high the CPU will go.

Once you've established the max stable clock for the CPU, then you can start on the RAM.
 
I've always found northwoods to top out around 3.5-3.7Ghz unless you have the M0 / 30 capper version.

Mul
 
Yeah mine was a 16(?) capper and hit a brick wall at 233MHz, regardless of how much more V's I gave it :(

[edit]Aha, found it! SL6WG Malay. That Pi score is not "real" cos I used SSE2 modded version. Got closer to 7 mins with normal Super Pi.

superpi8m OC3733 1-1.png


Suman
 
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I'd set the timings manually to what they are rated to (3,4,4,8 I think for your RAM?), just in case SPD decides to play silly buggers. You can worry about tightening them later after you've found the max stable CPU speed (I'm guessing the CPU will max out before you reach 250MHz on the RAM). IIRC the IC7 was reasonably stable with VDimm so the RAM should be stable at that voltage you've set, provided they are rated at 2.8V of course!

Can't remember my exact temps mate, sorry! Think they were pretty high though. 40C ish idle and 55+ load at a rough guess. I never ran overclocked though, just for benchmarks and stuff. Was plenty fast at stock back in those days :cool:

What exactly are you using to monitor temperature? Get MBM5 it's the gold standard for temp monitoring :)

Suman
 
Yeah, don't bother with that. The temp probe will a) not be very accurate, and b) if it's mounted on the actual CPU it will interfere with heatsink mounting, so that will make your real temps higher! I'd remove it, remount the heatsink with a thin layer of AS5 and use MBM5 or Speedfan to monitor your temps!

Suman
 
I'm not sure how small your probe is (temperature probe i mean :p), but even a small bump between the CPU and heatsink can ruin the interface and make it uneven. AS5 = Arctic Silver 5 ;) so yeah that's perfect!

Suman
 
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