Overclocking a Celeron 1.7ghz

realscot · 10 Sep 2006 at 08:04

My dad's really not into computers, he has an old Aries Celeron 1.7ghz, 256mb PC133 ram!!! some kind of ancient S3 graphics card and a Shuttle motherboard.
He asked if i could speed it up a bit for him, so i'm having a look now.

First of all i'm gonna change the 256mb PC133 ram for 2x256mb DDR 400 chips (motherboard takes both) although i think it will only run them at DDR 266.
Had a look in bios and it seems you can't change the FSB or cpu multi to overclock it at all.
So i'm left with 2 options as far as i can see. Try and find a bios that lets me overclock or source a cheap second had P4 CPU to give it a bit more oomph.
The board takes upto a 3gig or was it 3.2.. but not presscott core. I think the max FSB is 533 also. (and it has to be changed by jumpers :eek:

)
I had a look on shuttles website at bios's but didn't want to chance downloading one incase i took the wrong one.
The motherboard is a Shuttle MV43 P/N and has the AMI bios.

I know it would be a whole lot easier to just stick in a cheap 939 asrock dual and a cheap 939 cpu for a big speed increase, but he only really uses it for doing a spot of office work on, and a general browse of the internet. Damn the 2mb broadband loads faster than IE can handle with there only being the 256mb PC133 ram in just now

So yeah, if someone could advise a bios update that would be great.
Just to note running superPi and speedfan, cpu was hitting 40C full load.

jellybeard999 · 10 Sep 2006 at 08:24

If its that old, you may find the FSB is changed by jumpers, find the manual for the board would be my first port of call

Jonners · 10 Sep 2006 at 08:26

You wont get much out of it, I had a Celeron 1.8 back in the day, on a good day it'd do 2.1ghz but averaged around 1.95ghz.

The FSB can be raised in bios and not by jumpers.

realscot · 10 Sep 2006 at 08:29

so i guess the best and easiest way would be to find a cheap P4 chip then, that'd save having to reintall everything like with a motherboard change.

iraiguana · 10 Sep 2006 at 10:05

if u change cpu, its generally best to reinstall everything as drivers and windows generally will start to get errors randomly.

gurusan · 10 Sep 2006 at 10:13

iraiguana said:
if u change cpu, its generally best to reinstall everything as drivers and windows generally will start to get errors randomly.

Changing the CPU shouldn't make windows "start to get errors randomly"

Windows should detect the new CPU and install the driver automatically.

realscot · 10 Sep 2006 at 10:24

i'll see how it goes with the ram change first. It should probably make a half decent difference.
I've almost enough posts now to get into the members market. It is 250 right?
Hoping to have a look in there to see if there's any cheap 478 chips kicking about. the ones on the bay are a bit over priced for what they are really. I could have got a 2.93 celeron for about 40 delivered.. but then another tenner and your looking at around a P4 2.8. Dad's on holiday just now abroad so will let him know his options of CPU upgrade when he gets back.
If i had my way i'd have one of those boards with the onboard 6100 graphics cards and a second hand 3000+ venice or something. But as i say he's only really using it for office and broadband surfing.. God its slow loading the web pages. U hear the hard disk going nuts when there's a large amount of data. It's a 40gb samsung, but i reckon it's being over worked due to only having 256mb of ram and a cheapo celeron with F'all cache.