Coppermine woes... HELP!!!

[XENON]

Could someone be so kind as to give me some information on how to stabilize my P3 Coppermine Ghz processors? I can ramp them up to about 1125 with mediocre system stability, but random crashes are frequent. Voltage has been set to 1.95 on each, and I am running them off of a VP-6. I have an excellent cooling setup and the temps never exceed 40 degrees under the most stressful applications. Basically what I am looking for is a way to get the damn things past that 1125 Mhz barrier without buying into additional cooling. Better yet a way to provide full stability at 1125. I need to be able to play my Tribes 2 for more than 5 minutes without a lockup or randon restart. Your help is much appreciated!

[Allan Nielsen]

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[Allan Nielsen]

Anyway, now I've posted the rules, I feel I have to respond to your post...

Firstly, average overclocked speed (for a 1000MHz P3) is 1168 Mhz. What kind of cooling do you have, and what power supply?

Do you use arctic silver thermal grease?

What PCI devices do you have?

[XENON]

Ok I have a 300W Comp USA PS, with a STEP Thermodynamics cooling system (processors stripped of casings and coated with beryllium). I have 2 large heatsink/fan combos on each with the arctic paste. PCI devices are ATI Radeon 64 MB DDR VIVo, SB Live! platinum 5.1 with livedrive, 3com ethernet 10/100 card. the setup is running win2k SP 2.

[Allan Nielsen]

Have you tried to remove that 3com nic (and possibly the other PCI devices as well) to see if that helps?

[jmsandrsn]

Have you tried running each CPU by itself at 1125 MHZ. Do they run stable if you run them one at a time. Perhaps one of them is stable and the other is semi-stable.

[Kingslayer]

Another VP-6 users. Cool, world domination will soon follow.....

Look in your bios for your memory tweaking settings, set it to normal and see if it helps your stability. Also look in the same section you set your FSB, you will see a memory bus option. Set this to FSB-PCI, this will drop the clock on your memory and slow it down a tad.

Other than that, what everyone else said. Make sure your temps are straight, and ditch the 3Com for a minute to see if that's holding you back. If you still have the heatsink on your chipset, put something better on it, and put that old heatsink on your chipset of your NIC. I know it sounds stupid, but it worked for me.

[batboy]

Tim is our dual proc expert, but I do know it's tough to get the same level of overclocking out of dual procs compared to just one. What RAM are you using? The other guys are right about the network cards often hating being run out of spec.

[outhouse]

For some reason probably a bottle neck in the chipset the duel p3 1g's do not overclock well most people average around 1100 stable at best, i have not heards of anyone breaking this barrier to much but i wish you luck. someone has to get above this sooner or later and i hope its you. as was said earlier the Nic cards are not overclocker friendly, try what the guys above have said and let us know how your doing.

goodluck

[Pinky]

outhouse (Jul 12, 2001 11:24 p.m.):
For some reason probably a bottle neck in the chipset the duel p3 1g's do not overclock well most people average around 1100 stable at best...

I was thinking the same thing, as there is already stress on the chipset running 2 processors, the added pressure of running it above specs may be causing your lockups. Have you put a small fan on your northbridge (the little green heatsink/cpu on the motherboard)? That can get just as hot as a regular cpu when being run beyond specs. I have one on mine and think it makes all the difference in stability.

Just a note, with mine overclocked, I run it at 1.80v 100% stable. It's a cD0 chip that defaults at 1.75v 30-40C (idle/load temps). You voltage seems a bit high, most don't have to set it that high to get that overclock with cD0, but I'm not sure on a cC0...

[Kingslayer]

The northbridge on that board has a black heatsink. No fan. It's basically a 486 heatsink. It just twists off.

[XENON]

Thanks a lot for all your help guys. I managed to stabilize the system at 1100 with your tips. The 10% performance boost will satisfy me for now. I think with this system I can hold out until .10 micron chips hit the shelves. :)