O/C Athlon 650 first-gen Where to begin?

[wmgracer]

I have purchased an AthlonFreezerPro from 3d cooler.com and have a first generation Athlon 650 on a ABIT KA7 AMD Athlon Slot A mobo. I want to start overclocking, but where to I begin? Are there any walk throughs?

[Murphy]

Welcome to the black-art of overclocking!

I assume you mean you've bought a cooler. Good temps are a basis for succesfull overclocking. To get the spirit, you could try and see how high you can go with FSB overclocking, which is simply done from your BIOS. If you have no experience in BIOS editing, read your mobo manual carefully before proceeding!! Proceed with little increments, and test for stability in windows. When your PC doesn't boot at all after a lift of FSB, even after turning of power 3 or 4 times, you have to reset your mobo with the jumper, see your mobo manual for that. Some mobo's (I have a K7V) do autoreset after 2 times of bad startup. Increasing voltage raises stability, your standard is 1.6V, but with good cooling you can try upping it to 1.7V. I assume you use thermal grease with the new cooler, it's mandatory! No grease will cause overheating and cpu death. If you have temp. measurement, that would be great, watch out not to hit 50°C, higher is too hot. Lower temps give better stability!

Most of the people don't get (far) above 111MHz, I even stranded at 107MHz. Now it's time for the real stuff. You can also change the multiplyer (core mhz= bus mhz X multiplyer). In order to do this, you have to purchase (or make your own) GoldFingerDevice. Read some more over it here http://www4.tomshardware.com/cpu/99q4/991113/ and here http://www4.tomshardware.com/cpu/99q3/990826/ . What it comes down to is you have to saw open your Athlon case and add a card. I can advice you the cards without the need of aditional power (by molex etc.), I have one (tweaking device v2.0) and they are good. Simply plug on for your sweetest desires, in case of troubles, power down and get it off, you are back to normal.

This GFD allows you to set the multiplyer in increments of 0.5 from 3.5 to 10.5. What your CPU will do, depends on the week is was made (check the cpu database) which means core and cache speed. Most of the athlons let you get 200MHz more out of them standard, and with a little pushing some more. Having a 0.18core helps indeed! See http://www.geek.com/procspec/amd/k7.htm .

Some more info on:
http://www.tech-report.com/faq/athlon.x
Little warning: this one is a little bit out-dated, so check our forum or the homepage, they are way better (of course).

I think you have enough info for now. More questions, just reply.
Succesfull OC'ing,