133 FSB +

[KD]

I'm having trouble getting my system to boot at 133FSB. Can anyone please help? My system will start up and run great at 910Mhz,1.75v and will run really good at 945Mhz, 1.85v but it wont boot from there. I have to start it up at 910 then restart to get it to 945. Temps at idle run about 34-36c and at play 46-48c (thats with prime95). My hsf is a vantec FCE6254OD which has the Delta38 fan on it instaled with ASII, noisy little booger. Do you think the temps might still be the problem? I am going to replace the two 80mm case fans with two 120mm. I've read that you get alot more airflow and its alot more quiet.

Someone was talking about putting fans on the northbridge and southbridge for added cooling, forgive my ignorance but what is the northbridge and southbridge?

Thank you for your help

My toys: ASUS CUSL2,
P3 700 cBo, 256 PC133 ram,
onboard video, for now,
Sound blaster live,
Maxtor 30g 7200,
HP 10xCDRW,
Pioneer DVD.

[Super]

You can play around with your memory settings, CAS 2,3 and stuff. Also what PCI cards do you have? What motherboard are you using?

The northbridge and the southbridge are the 2 chips located on top, and bottom of your board. The northbridge might have a heatsink over it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that they're responsible for things like on-board sound and video.

Hope this helps.

[KD]

Whoops, my motherboard is an ASUS CUSL2 and I have sound blaster live. I've tried changing the memory settings both to 2 and 3. It works best at 333,7/9.

I thought thats what they were talking about but was'nt sure. Do you think it would be a good idea to put fans on them too?

Thank you

[Super]

Well, the cooler the better, but I don't know if it effects overclocking though. Soon I plan to do so, and I'll see how it goes.

You can try removing your sound blaster, and see how it goes than. Some PCI cards might don't like overclocking. And some members might tell you about this: I've heard that if you move the SB to a specific PCI slot, it will work ok or something like that. I'm not sure, because I use old ISA one.

[KD]

Thanks Super
I remenber reading that PCI cards can cause problems like that but I didnt think that the sounblaster would. I'll give that a try , it would sure be nice if that was all it was.

Thanks again

[Super]

Or bumping the voltage might help. Your chip is a cB0, and it will need more to overclock higher. But BE CAREFUL, watch your temperatures (especially your load temps, right now they are in a somewhat high range), and increase the voltage bit by bit. Make sure your chip is cool.

Good Luck!

[KD]

On my mobo I have 6 PCI slots, slot 2 and slot 6 are not shared. I have my SB in slot 2 and an intel modem in slot 6. I tried removing the SB and it still didnt help. Being that there not in shared slots would that matter?

I'll try uping the voltage 1 notch and see if that helps.

I appreciate your suggestions

[Super]

woops, I think I should have mentioned it....remove all of the PCI cards, and try booting. but if removing SB didn't help, this also might have no effect.

Just wait a bit, let people will see the thread, and hopefully they'll think of something! :)

EDIT: You might want to check out the Cpu Database (http://overclockers.cssftware.com/cpudb/index.cfm) and see what settings people used with your chip and m. board, it might help.

and You're Welcome! :)

[KD]

Tried uping the voltage 1.9v nothing, 1.95v still nothing.

I cant believe thats all this chip will do. Its gotta be a setting , cooling, operator? who said that?

[KD]

Would burning the chip help? I have ran it on prime95 for a bit running at 700Mhz 1.9v and it did seem to lower the temp from when I first started. Would running it at 700Mhz and maybe 1.95v for awhile hurt anything? The temp is only 46c.

[e_storm]

I have the same chip, except I think I have cBo stepping. I think you should be able to get 133fsb out of it, but not guaranteed.

I think you said your memory is set to cas3, keep it there till you get a stable speed. What is your PCI divider set to when you get your highest fsb? If its 3 and your fsb is at 130, then your pci cards are running at 43fsb, possibly too fast for some of em. If its set to 4, forget what I just said. Did you try removing all pci cards and trying from there?

If the pci thing doesn't work, then my guess would be temps. What are your case and ambient temps? If your getting cpu temps like 46 under load and your case temps are in the 30s, then like you said, better airflow in the case should help bring cpu temps down. I think if you can get cpu temps down to around 40 or below, you have a much better shot at anything over 133.

To give you an idea of what the chip can do, I'm currently set to 910mhz (130*7), cas2, 1.75v. This is the highest I can get at cas2. My temps don't get over 42 under full load (2-3 hours of gaming), case temp full load = 29, ambient = 25. I have run the chip at 980mhz (140*7), cas3, 1.85v but it gets pretty hot so I don't keep it there. Check the cpu database, the average overclock for this chip is at least 933, I'm pretty sure.

*edit*...btw, how many sticks of ram do you have to make your 256mb (1*256 or 2*128, etc..)? I've heard more than 1 stick can cause limits on OCing. Just a thought. :)

[KD]

I have tried booting without the PCI cards and that didnt help. You talk about a PCI divider, I have read something about that before but I dont know what that is. I'v looked in bios and my manuel and didnt see anything on that. I have an asus cusl2 mobo is that an option on this board? or am I just showing how new I realy am to overclocking?

My memory is cas3 and I only have1- 256 installed.

Case and ambient temps? (Dumb question) case temp, ambient temp vs. MB temp? Monitor shows MB temp and CPU temp. MB temp runs about 26-29c and CPU runs about 35-48c (idle vs. Play). I dont have any real hard games to test things with but these are the temps I get while running prime95, sisandra burnin. I'm using asus pc probe to monitor things cause I like the way its setup. I can go back and look at pervious temps at any time. I tried MBM5 and it gave me the same temps so as far as accuracy I think the pc probe is just fine.

Thank you for your feedback

[Super]

Yea, try burning in. Run at a stock speed (or a little higher), and use something like 1.9V if your temps are ok.

[e_storm]

KD (Jul 03, 2001 12:27 p.m.):
I have tried booting without the PCI cards and that didnt help. You talk about a PCI divider, I have read something about that before but I dont know what that is. I'v looked in bios and my manuel and didnt see anything on that. I have an asus cusl2 mobo is that an option on this board? or am I just showing how new I realy am to overclocking?

My memory is cas3 and I only have1- 256 installed.

Case and ambient temps? (Dumb question) case temp, ambient temp vs. MB temp? Monitor shows MB temp and CPU temp. MB temp runs about 26-29c and CPU runs about 35-48c (idle vs. Play). I dont have any real hard games to test things with but these are the temps I get while running prime95, sisandra burnin. I'm using asus pc probe to monitor things cause I like the way its setup. I can go back and look at pervious temps at any time. I tried MBM5 and it gave me the same temps so as far as accuracy I think the pc probe is just fine.

Thank you for your feedback

On my board, the PCI divider is shown when I change the fsb...it looks like this: 128fsb (4:3:1)....this is (chip fsb speed, Sdram speed, pci speed). So the chip will run 128fsb(*multiplier), SDRAM will run 3/4 of 128=96mhz (I think), and PCI will run at 1/4 of 128 = 32mhz. The PCI speed is basically the ratio of first number to last number, hence 4 is the pci divider. If they wanted to make is easy, they would express the dividers like this 128fsb(1, 3/4, 1/4). 1/4 of 128 being the pci bus speed (32). PCI bus is normally 33.33mhz, when you OC it, the divider becomes important as PCI devices don't usually take too well to big deviations from 33.33. Hopefully I didn't butcher that explanation. :) If you had trouble without the PCI cards, thats probably not the problem then anyway..lol.

I'd guess MB temp is probably the same as case temp, I think thats a thermistor on the board somewhere? If thats true, the case temps look very good, so we could rule out lack of case flow being the problem. hhmmm...Let me read some more....I forgot what your setup/cooler was...

[anvil]

Different people have different experiences, of course, but I know that a load temperature as high as you have (46 C + ) would definitely cause my processor to fail stability tests. In fact, it will fail on Prime95 at 138 fsb (= 1035 on my 750e) if the temps get above 28 C, but is fine below. Since my system routinely runs 35-37 C without special cooling, I set my fsb at 133, where it is stable.

Point is, ... that load temp could be causing your failures.

anvil

[e_storm]

I'm pretty confident that you should be able to get a lot further with the mobo/chip combo.

If temps are still high and you have good case temps (MB temps??), then theres probably a problem with the chip cooler I would guess. You could try reseating it, ensuring its seated squarely and flush on the chip die. Make sure you put on the AS2 following the directions here (http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_instructions.htm), so you can rule that out too. It could be that that cooler just can't handle the load, but it looks to be as good or better than my Alpha Pal6035 and I don't run temps that high, so I doubt it. It's still tough for me to believe that you can get case temps that low with only 2-80mm fans, or maybe I'm just jealous that it too me 2-120s, and 80 and a 60 to do the same...lol :) Maybe some other people have opinons about the thermistor connected to the MB temp in MBM and its accuracy.

Barring the cooling stuff, the only other things that comes to my mind are making sure you have a powerful enough PS, and that your HD can handle the OCing. Sorry I couldn't be of more help :(

[KD]

Thank you everyone for your input I greatly appreciate it.
I'm going to work on getting my cooling down alittle more and hope that works otherwise this chip might just have to play at 910Mhz.

Happy overclocking

[freshy98]

Also check the voltage. I know it's said already, but you might need the wire trick to boot at 133MHz. My Celeron 566MHz runs at about 876MHz to 901MHz (depends on summer ;-) ) but I needed the wire trick to boot at 1.85VCore.

[batboy]

This really annoys me, several people have suggested that you raise the voltage when it's quite clear your CPU load temps are way too high. Raising the voltage just makes it worse and you run the risk of frying your CPU. E-storm and Anvil are right, you need to work on cooling. Those temps are way too high for that level of overclocking. I personally have not been all that impressed with Vantec coolers, but others claim to have good success with them. Pull that CPU cooler off and check it. Sometimes when you install them, the thermal paste gets squeezed out too much as you press down on it to clip it in place. If you can't afford to get a better heatsink, then consider lapping what you have and then carefully reapplying it. As for motherboard cooling, forget the southbridge chip. At those FSB speeds you;re dealing with that's not an issue (worry about that when you approach 150 MHz). The northbridge chip is a different story. That does need more cooling because it heats up more and usually sits near the CPU and collects radiant heat from that. Generally on newer mobos it already has a small passive heatsink attached, often (but not always) green in color (aka the "greenie"). Look in your mobo manual for the location on a diagram if you can't find it otherwise. A 40mm fan will fit right onto the northbridge sink if you use the right size screws. Definitely put in a case fan or two if you haven't already. Generally, most people suck fresh air in from the front and exhaust hot air out the back. You need good air circulation across the mobo. You are very close, do some more cooling mods and get those temps down before trying anything else. From my experience (and like e-storm said), if you can keep the CPU load temps down to 40 degrees or less, you're good to go.

[anvil]

And if I might add something, Batboy, ... just because a little extra voltage is good, it does not follow that a lot of extra voltage is better. Some processors just do not benefit from a very high vcore. I know, ... I have one.

anvil