The Multiplier or the FSB...

[galaxy2x4]

I have an Athlon TBird 800 and ASUS A7V mobo. right now my Tbird is at 950 because or my 100mhz FSB and my multiplier set at 9.5. Now i have read and seen people whose system is overclocker strictly by raises the FSB while others left it at 100 and moved the multiplier up to 10. Whats the safest, and best way to overclock this chip. Also is there a temperature difference. How come i rarely read about people switching both the multiplier and the FSB
Thanks
Doug

[el]

well you can only push a chip so far for one thing! I would find the highest speed with a high fsb because then everything is overclocked and you won't have to wait as many CPU cycles before it gets the info it needs!

[Rob Cork]

Like me you have the A7v, which is based on the KT133 chipset and unfortunately can't get very high on the fsb speed. Most max out at around 110MHz, due to the chipset alone, and pci/agp cards or memory may prevent you getting even that far. I'd see how far you can raise the fsb stably on your board (probably between 105-110MHz) - if you're running 950 then 110 would put your cpu at 1045, which it probably won't like, so you may need to drop the multiplier to 9 (990) or 8.5 (935). If like me you can't even go above 105, then you could run 9x105 (945) - just try a few combinations and see what works.

[tweeknfreek]

ck out my sig as you can see im running at 266mhz fsb i have both sets of dipswitches and use jumper mode to set voltage at max 1.88 i have it set at 133x7.5 and it is right at 1gig running 266fsb my temps are good i use vantec hsf w/delta 7000 rpm fan cpu temp never gets hotter than 42-43c under full load i used to use just cpu multiplier with 100fsb 100x10 and temps the same but 133x7.5 is faster even though cpu mhz are the same I have same board and chip set kt133 with bios version 1007 go to www.asus.com to get it

[el]

yeah try it at 7x133 it might work even with the kt133 chipset on my p3600E that is the only option I really had so I went for 800 6x133 and it worked great!

[Nagorak]

el (Jun 26, 2001 03:52 p.m.):
yeah try it at 7x133 it might work even with the kt133 chipset on my p3600E that is the only option I really had so I went for 800 6x133 and it worked great!

On a KT133 this absolutely will NOT work. The highest I ever got an A7V to run stable was 103 MHz and I had 3 of them! I could run at 105, but it would eventually crash and burn... For you multiplier is the best way to go.

[merlins_wraith]

For optimal performance I would suggest finding a mix of both multiplier and fsb increases. The multiplier will give you a bulk of your increase, while increasing the fsb will give you incremental increases. My suggestion is to find the highest possible multiplier that will boot into windows without any increase in fsb. Then drop the multiplier by one step and start increasing the fsb, until you find the highest possible setting that will boot into windows.

PS - For the record my A7V is setting on the workbench ... damn dipswitches!

[Nagorak]

merlins_wraith (Jun 27, 2001 02:32 a.m.):
For optimal performance I would suggest finding a mix of both multiplier and fsb increases. The multiplier will give you a bulk of your increase, while increasing the fsb will give you incremental increases. My suggestion is to find the highest possible multiplier that will boot into windows without any increase in fsb. Then drop the multiplier by one step and start increasing the fsb, until you find the highest possible setting that will boot into windows.

PS - For the record my A7V is setting on the workbench ... damn dipswitches!

I'd consider this mostly a waste of time with an A7V...you just don't have enough FSB headroom to work with. Either you're going to end up running the chip 50 or so MHz slower than it will run with multiplier alone, or you'll end up with a system that suffers from random freezes. A 3-5 MHz increase in FSB is not going to do anything for you in terms of performance. I seriously doubt you will be able to get anything more than 105 MHz out of the A7V, so you should be aware of that before you start messing with it. I think it makes a lot more sense to set the highest multiplier possible, and then try to squeeze a few more MHz out of it by raising the FSB by 3-4. To seriously FSB overclock you need a motherboard that can go up to at least 120-130, and KT133 boards just won't.

[Wa11y]

So, what about the Gigabyte GA-7ZX board? I was forced to upgrade awhile back due to a bad BIOS flash, and I went with that board because it fit in my budget. I have an AMD Duron 800. I was playing with the FSB dipswitches, and got it up to 106MHz stable, but didn't play with the multiplier or voltage. I'll do that tomorrow on my day off. The manual for the 7ZX says it'll do 133 FSB, but when I went straight to that, it froze (not suprising). I'll have to look at my BIOS to see if it'll let me play with the AGP and PCI FSB, but I don't think it will. It looks like your standard Award BIOS.