Got lucky with retail AthlonXp 2500+

Just registered here at OC forums. Hope I put this in the right place.

I've been overclocking since the first PPGA Celerons at 300 would do 450 quite easily with a simple FSB bump and PC100. However, I'd say I'm not a "serious" overclocker.

I built a new system back in August of 2003, and after reading some posts here, I guess I got lucky with the retail Barton 2500+ I got from newegg. When I first built the machine, I set the BIOS on the Biostar M7NCD Pro to 200FSB x 10 (very mild overclock from 1.83Ghz to 2Ghz), and left the voltage and pretty much all other BIOS settings at the defaults. I then installed W2K Pro, service packs, my apps and Games, and used the system for months. Zero problems of any kind.

A month or so ago I decided to see if I could squeeze a little extra juice outta this chip, and bumped the multiplier to 11, still at the default voltage of 1.65v. I had read that all the AthlonXPs had the multiplier locked, and read articles on Tom's and various places on how to unlock the chips with pencils and what not. I was pleasently surprised to find that the multiplier wasn't locked on this retail AthlonXP, as I had 'underclocked' the multiplier when I initially built the system.

After raising the multiplier to 11, with the resulting 2208Mhz (system clock crystal is apparently off slightly, as with most systems), the system has run perfectly since. So, I'm the proud owner/user of an AthlonXP 3200+ for the price of a 2500+ This is a ~375MHz increase with the stock AMD retail HSF and stock voltage. I must admit that when I first opened the retail package, I was somewhat astounded at the size of the aluminum heatsink. It is freaking huge. In addition, it has a circular copper slug embedded in it for the die contact surface. This is not your average retail cooler.... I bow down to AMD for supplying this awesome HSF.

Under load (Seti@Home) my mobo monitoring software was reporting 52.5 degrees Celsius. I thought this was a little on the high side, even with the fact that my office is in the basement of my house, which stays pretty cool. So, I decided to replace the stock AMD 60mm fan (AVC model F6015B12LY), which I must say was a bit 'thin' at 12mm deep. I installed a 60x23mm SuperRed model CHA6012DB-A made by Cheng Home Electric CO LTD. This fan is of the same quality/performance level of an NMB, Nidec, Denki or Panaflow of the same demensions. It moves about twice as much air as the 80mm PSU fan in this Maxtop case, lol.

The result of the fan swap? As I type this, with Seti@Home crunching away, my CPU temp is 43 degrees Celsius with ~4400rpm on the SuperRed. That's a drop of 9.5 degrees C with just a fan swap. This tells us something about the quality of the heatsink provided by AMD in my retail kit.

When I still had the system at 200x10 I created a new Seti account just to see what kind of grind times I was pushing:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/[email protected]&cmd=user_stats_new
2GHz with dual channel DDR400 yielded 2 hour 20 mintutes average over 40 work units. I'd guess that I'm averaging just over 2 hours per WU at @2.2GHz.

This is the first AMD machine I've built. I've had all Intel over the past 18 years with the exception of a Ti-486SLC-40 back in the early '90s. I'll probably stick with AMD for the foreseeable future. I've been really impressed with this system. It's everything I could want and more.

Welcome to these forums. Nice overclock using retail cooling, no less.

It wouldn't hurt to do some stability tests like Prime95 torture test to make sure you're stable and don't require more voltage.

As things go with AMD, they now have mobile Bartons which are always multiplier unlocked and overclock from 2.5 to 2.8 GHz and cost only $77 to $98. It's tough for Intel to beat that for the $ .

Wow, i'm surprised someone replied to my post so quickly. I had forgotten exactly which 60mm fan I installed on the heatsink, so I had to shut down the machine and pull the fan, write down the model #, and then come back and edit my post. You replied before I got back, lol. Anyway, I got the correct fan info on here now.

As far as stability testing, do you know what Seti@Home is? It was the "defacto" burn-in app for quite a few years. No app will tax a CPU more. Some may equal it, but not surpass it. It's very floating point and cache intensive, as the primary dataset is just over 512KB in size. The process when running is ~16MB, so obviously this exceeds the onchip cache, and the dual channel DDR helps a bit here. In addition, I play at least 3 hours a day (actually more like 10 ) of WC3 Frozen Throne, and have played Counter-Strike 1.5 and 1.6 extensively. ROCK SOLID. I've never even had an application crash on this system.

Thanks for the info on the mobile chips. I'm going to have to read up on them. Are they socket A? If so, I might have to look into that down the road. This current system is just so damn fast, I can't see needing a faster chip for a while. Maybe when I start using some new games (if HL2 ever gets released) I might swap in a mobile and o'clock the devil outta it.

Yes, they're Socket A.

Athlon 64 Socket 939 is coming next month already.
Athlon 64 is 25% faster than Athlon XP Barton with same GHz.

http://www.c627627.com/AMD/AthlonXP/

So, did you miss the Seti@Home part of my post, or is it your opinion that Seti@Home is not a sufficient test of system stability?

This is not intended to flame, I'm just curious, and wondering if I've lost touch with reality or something...

There are many stability tests, some of which stress the system more than Prime95 Torture Test. The only reason Prime95 Torture Test was mentioned is that it's most frequently used my the majority of people here when discussing stability tests.

Other tests are just as good or better. Your 2.2 GHz overclock is not unexpected, you can do better with non-retail cooling but 2.2 is about whay you can do with retail Barton cooling + luck.

Roger that regarding Prime95.

Well, I guess I've been bit by the o'clock bug again, and I'm playing with mulitpliers now. I just crashed at 11.5 at stock voltage, so I bumped it up to 1.7, and we'll see how that goes.

BTW, I wouldn't really call my current HSF "stock" by any means. The heat sink is "stock" as it came with the CPU in the AMD retail package. As I said earier, however, it's unlike any stock retail heatsink I've ever seen, especially considering the copper "die contact/heat spreader" plug embedded in it. From everything I'd read, you usually don't get that high quality of a HS in a retail package.

With the fan swap, and the stock HS, I'd say I'm probably in the middle of the pack of the quality aftermarket HSF coolers at this point. The SuperRed 6012D flows just over 20CFM, compared to the anemic 10CFM of the original AMD fan.

Stock AMD fan: AVC F6015B12L
Replacement: Cheng CHA6012D
http://www.chenghome.com.tw/uploaddir/product/cha6012bb.htm
http://www.avc.com.tw/products/oem/dc-fan-products/2003dc_fan pdf/33-35.pdf

And....

So far so good at 200 * 11.5x = 2305MHz @ 1.7v
Hovering @ ~47 degrees C right now with, of course, S@H running minimized.

I haven't locked up yet, and mozilla hasn't crashed on me yet, as it did at 1.65v at 11.5x

Ok, since the system hasn't locked up on me yet, I'm going to try some WC3 and post back with results....

nice overclock !!!

Ok, I ran 100% stable thru 1 game of WC3 on bnet, WITH Seti@Home running in the background, 11.5x200 @ 1.7v. I'm at 11.5x and 1.7 now as well, and at this point, this seems the highest I can go so far....

I tried bumping up to a 12x multiplier for 2400MHz, and even with the voltage as high as 1.775 in the BIOS, W2K would shutdown shortly after booting. I was wary of trying a voltage above 1.775.

I admit I haven't read nearly enough posts, so I'm sure there's info out there about thresholds at various multiplier and voltage junctions.

Anyone have any pointers? It's not a thermal issue at this point, as I'm not even getting to the point where I can load up the CPU with seti (or any other app for that matter).

Do I need to up the voltage even more? Is 1.8 - 1.825 acceptable? Or am I in "you'll prolly fry yer CPU" territory at this voltage range?

Well, I've tried bumping the voltage all the way up to 1.85, but the system still crashes....

I added a 2nd fan co-axially, which I was able to do because the NMB MicroBoxer I have rotates the opposite direction of the SuperRed. The combo of the two is quite a bit louder, but the CPU does run cooler, and the pressure coming out of the heatsink is something to behold! My God....that co-axial setup pushes some major air. Looks kinda funny as two 60x23mm fans makes for one very tall HSF.

I'm gonna keep playing with it to see if I can get it higher, although I doubt it. If it runs rock solid at 1.7v and 200 x 11.5, I wouldn't think it should take 1.9 volts just to get it up to 12x. Is it typical for the voltage increase to be on a steeper curve than the percentage increase in clock speed as you go higher?

I think your heat sink is the bottle neck. Monitor your CPU core temperature. If you get over 46C at idle, you may have problem. My mobile XP isrunning at 2400MHz with 1.92V Vcore.

Although a fan swap is helpful, there is no substitute for an all copper heatsink replacement (like Thermalright).

If you do 2.3 GHz with stock heatsink, that would be unusual.
If you do more, that would be an incredible chip you got there...

HardwareFreak said:

Is it typical for the voltage increase to be on a steeper curve than the percentage increase in clock speed as you go higher?

Click to expand...

Yes it is fairly typical. Some people with top of the range cooling will risk running over 2 volts through their CPU. I wouldn't. It gets to a point of diminishing returns for so many volts. With better cooling you may to better yet, but a ~480 MHz overclock on an Athlon is not to be snivelled at.

Whilst you may have found the barrier for your CPU, you still have plenty you could do to optimise the system. You could try tightening the timings on the RAM, overclocking the video card or even just tidying up the wiring in the case. Have a look at some of the stickies in the various forums.

Well done so far, that is a very good overclock with fairly stock components. Some of us struggle to do as well with our NF7s and Thermalright coolers. Stick with it!

After more tweaking, I've made it up to 2345MHz actual. Still using the AMD heatsink, but with the fan mod I mentioned previously. I bumped the FSB to 203MHz, which gives the added benefit of a little extra memory bandwidth as well. This BIOS on this M7NCD Pro motherboard automatically increases the memory bus frequency when one ups the FSB. Having the CPU bus and memory busses synchronized is nice. I'm assuming this is a limitation (feature?) of the nVidia nForce2 400 northbridge.

Currently:

203MHz x 11.5 = 2345Mhz (actual)
-1833MHz = 512MHz over stock
1.725v vcore

Stock AMD heatsink, custom fan tweak (I hope to have pics up fairly soon). System is rock solid. CPU temp as reported by Winbond software is the same, 43 degrees C under load (seti@home).

PICs of the uber fan mod

Well, I finally took pictures of the mega fan mod. My apologies for the quality of the photos, as the only digital camera I have is a Phillips keychain cam, and it's very sensitive to lighting. It's also not even a half megapixel. That said, here are pics of the dual coaxial fan mod on the stock AMD heatsink:













Something else I've discovered since originally posting about my O'clock. This BioStar mobo BIOS resets back to the default Vcore (1.65v) upon power off. This may be why I couldn't go higher back in April, as the voltage setting I was applying was being lost whenever I'd power down the machine. I'm currently running at 1.8 vcore reference (again, the regulator on this board bouces around quite a bit, dipping as low as 1.72 when set to 1.8).

Anyway, I'm stable at 12 x 200 at 1.8v vcore, same DRAM timings as before. 2410Mhz with the stock AMD heatsink!

I wonder how many fans it would take (stacked) before the increase in airflow becomes zero'ed out. Me and a buddy at school were talking about this.

Anyway- Nice overclock. 47C on stock air is pretty nice for that much of an overclock. As long as those are accurate temps, I think you've got a bit of leeway before you reach unstable temps. Good luck! And welcome to the forums!

Well done, brutha.
I notice you've been focusing more on the multiplier, why don't you play around with the FSB this time? Can you hold your multi at 11? Then nudge that fsb slowly all the way to kingdom come? 2.4Ghz on retail HS is not something to sneeze at. Good job soldier! Now keep going...

Nice job. I'm currently being limited by my stock Thorton heatsink (my Athlon is a Thoroughbred B fyi) right now after getting a little over 200MHz out of my CPU at 1.8v (1.76v actual). I'm getting a ALX800 from SVC for $15. I have a topic going asking about a fan for it. Should be fun to see if I can get any extra out of it (its a lousy stepping).

Does the SLK-900 work on the barton 2500? Newegg said 2800+ and above, but it would seem to me that it should work on the 2500 as well.

jamo said:

Does the SLK-900 work on the barton 2500? Newegg said 2800+ and above, but it would seem to me that it should work on the 2500 as well.

Click to expand...

I'm running an slk900 on my 2500 mobile.... you should have no problems with a desktop barton.