Trying to stabilize barton 3000 @ 2500mhz-ideas?

yeeello

After some good advice from the pro's over here I've been trying to get my athlon 3000 stock of 2167 stable at 2500mhz.

My multiplier is unlocked so i'm doing 166x15 = 2500.

I boots fine, runs fine, and just completed 3dmark03 completely, so I've got that going for me, but its acting just a little quirky.

Voltage is at 1.80 and i can bring it up to 1.85 if i need to, but it doesn't seem stable at 1.85 even though the temperature isn't all that bad.

My questions to you all is what might be the cause of some of the instability and what might i tweak to get it stable at this clock speed.

My system: 512 crucial pc2700 memory
Cooling: 84cfm tornado on the vantec super copper thing SLK800a. I have one 80mm intake and one 120mm sending it out.

Using arctic silver on the cpu.

thoughts:

Could it be overheating? does the multiplier matter really?

What would indicate a lack of power from the PSU?

could it be my memory--even though i'm not above 166mhz?

Thanks in advance!

E

run prime 95 to see if your cpu is stable at that speed.. from what i can gather i think your cpu is allowing you to boot in to windows at 2.5 ghz.. but is not completely stable... and prime95 will prob fail..

prime95 you got it--its giving me some audio errors too, i'm probably borderline crash, just acting a little odd at the moment.

What exactly do you mean by "quarky" first of all?

Second of all, although it may not matter if you lowered the FSB, that CPU was meant to run at 200mhz FSB.


Assuming everything is installed correctly i doubt that you have an overheating problem as that is a very good HSF combo.

Furthermore not many AMD's can actually get higher then 2.5ghz, just because it's a top of the line AMD doesnt mean it can get a higher overclock then say my 1700 which is nearly at 2500.

I'd suggest lowering the clock speed and downloading prime95 to test your system slowly as you build your way back up to a nice overclock.

Since you can change the multiplier dont worry about pure clock speed first, try and get your FSB as high as you can. Again testing system stability using prime 95. When you find the max, then start bumping the multiplier. Dont get greedy ;-)

Prime95 can be found here ( http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm )

Thanks for the info man!

I'll try that..I ran into a problem though, i corrupted my Win xp last night unfortunately, i think i was trying to jack the FSB too high--so, I'm a bit worried about pumping up the PCI./AGP speeds--is there any software out there that can lock those?

E

Your motherboard locks them automatically. Although you can change the AGP frequency, there is not enough gain to bother, some would argue there is no gain. Either way, dont do it.

High PCI/AGP speeds are not the only way to currupt your OS, granted it is generally the most common (although most new high end motherboards lock the PCI speed) it isn't the only way.

If for instance (and this has happened to me at least twice) your CPU is overclocked to an unstable amount, or perhaps even your ram, bottom line your system isnt stable, and you boot it up. While it's loading, saving, or doing anything to an important system file and your system crashes that could cause problems.

It's not different then pulling the power chord on system bootup, just not a very safe thing to do.

That is why it is important to make small jumps, generally speaking your system will become unstable from a prime95 point of view (that is it'll lock up or P95 will report errors) long before your at the point where it'll crash on bootup.

It's said very often that overclocking is safe just so long as you are safe about it, in otherwords, be patient and take your time and you shouldnt have to worry about anything.

which mobo are you using? can you check the bios for temps and voltage reading from your bios.? This will give you an idea how your mobo is receiving volts from your pwr supply.
BTW, instead of 166x15... back down to 133FSB x 18, if your mobo allows you to. do this starting with default vcore, see if you can boot up to windows desktop and runs some tests to stress the cpu. prime95 will do it. If it runs good @ 2.4GHz, then up the FSB 3MHz at a time to see where your CPU starts to get "quirky" with you rig. annotate everything that you do, FSB speed, multiplier, and vcore... this will give you and idea to set up your rig on the 166 FSB. Good luck