PIII 500 Overclock Success and Problems

Well, I've overclocked my P3 500 to 575mhz.... 15% overclock, not bad.

Running on an Asus P3B-F MB, 384MB of RAM PC100(1 stick of 256 Kingston PC133, 2 sticks of 64mb of some nonamer)

According to SiSoft's Sandra, CPU temp's at 43°C, stock HSF. But it says something about it adjusting my temperatures. Why would it adjust my temperatures? Now mind you, my CPU temps according to the BIOS is 65°C, but I think that's a load of crap, cuz I can put my finger to any part of the CPU and it only feels slightly warmer than body temp, making it about 40°C. So the 43°C makes sense. But should I be concerned nonetheless?

I can't push the CPU any higher... right now the FSB's at 115mhz, with PCI at 38mhz.... I don't wanna do 120/40, cuz that's pushin my PCI too much. But I have a 124/31 setting, and I tried that, and my comp wouldn't post, even when I pushed the Vcore from 2.00V to 2.40V (yeah, btw, I'm running at the lowest Vcore, 2.00V right now)

Any tips for getting it higher?

Another thing, running Prime95's torture test, my whole comp froze during Test 2 (i walked away for like 10mins to watch Simpsons)

That a bad thing?

Your CPU is the old style P-III, not a coppermine core, so they only will go about 600 MHz max anyway. To get anymore out of it, you'll need better cooling and to lose all but the PC133 RAM. Even if you did all that, you really won't gain much more. I say be happy with what you got until you can afford to upgrade. Checking temps in the BIOS is not an accurate way. Maybe download MBM program so you can check temps in real time. If the system crashed in Prime95, it means your not stable. It won't hurt it, but it means you might need to back off to say 112 FSB in order to restore stability.

In the other office I have the same setup almost....
asus P3b-F and a 500 MHz P3. I used to OC it to 550
but the heat was killing it when I ran prime95. Also if I
OC'd it too much my 512 MB of PC133 ECC ram became
regular ram i.e. non-ecc. The old 500's sucked for OC
so I just backed it down to 505 MHz and forgot about it.
At least it's stable and never gives me any trouble even
with the SCSI controller.

It might be easier to just pick up a faster old P3 or
find an adaptor and use the flipchips.