Overclocking Problem 3.2c on Abit IC7-G

Well i attempted to do my first bit of overclocking right now and it didnt really work. I went into my bios and upped the fsb to 210. The DRAM ratio is set to 1:1 and then i rebooted. The first startup screen came and said the processor was running at 3.36 i think and the dimm running at 210. It goes to the next screen where after it usually goes to the windows loading but just says "disk read error" If i have cd-rom booting enabled at all it says failed to boot from cd. I put the fsb down to 205 and same thing happened. I then take it back to 200 and everything is fine. I am obviously doing something wrong with the memory ratio or something.

PS: My AGP ratio (CPU, AGP, PCI) is 6:2:1 Not sure if this has anything to do with anything

I am a big noob to this so any help/adivce is appreciated.

Thanks

What ram are you using and what timings, also what voltage are you giving the ram and the cpu?

With respect to the ratios...I am not positive about how Abit reports this, but it appears that the AGP and PCI are being calculated as follows: Divider of 6 on the 200 fsb default ratio = 33 (200/6) with the agp at the resulting 33 x 2 or 66 and the PCI at x1 = 33. Those are the default speeds for AGP and PCI, respectively. You are not overclocked so high at 210 that you would be out of specs on either of these so your problems should not be coming from this area.

I suspect your ram might be the culprit. To check this out, go into the BIOS, usually in the Advanced Chipset options page and select the 5:4 memory ratio (might show it as 320) which will allow the cpu to run at 1.25% of the memory speed. The math would be 200/5 = 40 x 4 = 160 MHz x 2 = DDR320. Substitute your cpu clock speed for the 200 and you will get your memory speed. By using this ratio you can test your cpu and eliminate the ram from the equation. With the ram running at the 200 that you now know it can do and the 5/4 ratio, you could in theory run the cpu at 250 (250/5 =50 x 4 = 200 x 2 = DDR400), of course it would be highly unlikely that your 3.2 P4 cpu will run at 250fsb so this ratio should be sufficient for you. The 3/2 ratio is also available but would be more appropriate for a higher clocking cpu like a 2.4 that has a lower multiplier therefore would be running at a much higher fsb than your 3.2 does. Anyway, once you've established what your cpu can do, then you can go back and determine whether the ram's timings need to be relaxed or add'l voltage or what ever else may be the bottleneck. First thing is to determine just what the cpu will do.

Here is a link to an introductory P4 overclocking guide which includes using the memory divider. It should give you an overview of the process.

http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/How-To/Overclocking-Your-P4-800FSB/

Hope some of this helps.

i set the agp pci timings to fixed just now and it booted fine. Any reason why this would be? Thanks for your help though. Will i ever need to adjust these timings?

For really high fsb (300 and beyond range) I've seen guys run the agp around 69-70 but I can't think of any reason why you would need to adjust them. I am surprised that they got out of whack at a relatively low fsb of only 210.

In any event, locking the agp & pci is the best way to go and I'm glad you got it worked out.