AMD Classic Athlon OC...help? [Archive]

Murphy

03-12-01, 03:34 PM

daNo (Mar 12, 2001 02:40 p.m.):
K here's the deal. I have got ahold of a CLASSIC (Slot A) Athlon 600 mHz and a Jetway 771AS mobo with 256 mb PC 133. I have read the beginners forum, along with other o/cin websites, but have not been able to find something like a tutuorial. I was hoping that someone could give a step by step way to overclock this thing. Or if someone knew of an *exact* link where one is provided...it would be great.

I've seen this one location where it lists many peoples' adventures with overclocking a 600 on average to 700, 800 and 900, and I was hopin to get in on the fun.

Hi DaNo,

IMHO athlon classics are one of the best OC' able CPU's around. I've done it myself and had much fun. You can overclock your CPU at two ways:

- FSB overclocking: the easy way, just select a higher FSB speed in your bios or set this by jumpers on the mobo (depends on your mobo, I'm not familiure with your one). Your standard bus is 100MHz (actually 200MHz, it is dubble data pumped bus), you can increase this in LITTLE increments (like 101, 103, 105 etc, depends also on what your mobo allows). At a certain speed, usually around 107 and higher, windows starts becoming unstable, with blue screens etc. or hanging at starting up windows. You can than set back speed one increment OR increase voltage a little bit. I would advice not to increase voltage more than 0.1V until you really know what you are doing, take care of good cooling and know your temps.

Be aware that upping your FSB not only overclocks your CPU, but all your pheripherals, like PCI bus, AGP bus and IDE devices. Harddisks in UDMA are know to go corrupted when running long time at extreme high FSB for instance.

Lets say you reach it to 107 (that was my max at first), then you do 642MHz with also some little faster pheripherals. Not very exciting, huh? Well, this is were we go to hardware OC'ing:

-GFD overclock: This involves connecting a little device (GoldFingerDevice) to your Athlons PCB to manually set the CPU multiplyer (remember: Core speed = Bus speed x multiplyer example: 107x6=642). All processor cores are made in the same process and afterwards rated a certain speed. In this method you take advantage of this by searching the limits of the core yourself. This where our CPU-database on the frontpage drops in. Cores made in the same week have about equal potential. Many people around the world look up their weeknumber and post it with their OC speed. So when you know your weeknr. you can look for you possible potential.

Back to OC'ing itself: To see the connector for this device, you need to crack open your athlon. For info on GFD's I refer to:
http://www4.tomshardware.com/cpu/99q4/991113/
http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/1999q4/gf-card/gf-1.x

This goes same as FSB, increase your multiplyer step by step (0.5x at a time) until you run into troubles, windows instability solved by increasing voltage/lowering temps, no boot means you are about the max of your CPU.

There is some info around on internet about how-to's on cracking open your athlon (removing the cover), but can't find them right now. I think you know enough for now, but I'm always open for more questions. If you run into trouble with L2 cache, go to http://www.amdzone.com/files.cfm and get mathlon V3.00beta to set L2 cache multiplyer. I've saved the best for the end, this is the all in how to on athlons and oc'ing:
http://www.tech-report.com/faq/athlon.x

Before you start messing around on your CPU, be sure to do your homework and KNOW what you are doing. This way you can have a lot of fun and get a major speed increase.

Much succes, let us know how you are doing!
Mr.Murphy