Where would be a good place to start for a newbie?

I am tinkering with the idea of overclocking my cpu, and need some ideas on where to begin. I am ordering a heat sink and fan so I can lower the temps a bit. I got pretty good air flow through the case with for 90mm fans 2in/ 2out. I am looking to tweak without wiring any pins or any fancy electrical manipulations. I just want to know how far i can go by playing with the BIOS, and if needed, how to bypass (in bios) the limit in which I can raise the voltage. Any suggestions, or articles??
Thanks...

Almost every mobo brand has a slightly different BIOS and settings for overclocking. Not all mobos allow overclocking. I've never messed with IWILL boards, so I can't help you. Maybe study the manual and then go into the BIOS and look for a way to raise the FSB (sometimes called CPU clock or system frequency). The default setting will be 133 MHz, so increase it a little at a time and test for stability and check temps. If you plan on overclocking as much as possible, then a better CPU cooler and Arctic Silver thermal paste is a good idea. At some point, you'll start running the memory faster than it'll like, so you have to set it down to 3X. If you have a setting that 'fixes" the PCI bus, then use that too.

Thanks you for the tip. I dug around a little and found where to adjust the FSB. It ranged from 100/33 - 156/39 Mhz, however the highest i could set it at was 142/36 which put me at 2700 mhz. (ANy higher and windows would not boot) My temps are okay even with the current setting of 142/36 @ 2700 the cpu never breaks 42c. Will it help to increase the core voltage which is currently set at default 1.45V. It ranges in BIOS up to 1.85. If so... How do I balance the two out? voltage vs bandwith that is... I also noticed there was a vcoreB in the health portion of the bios which was at 1.77V what is that?
All feedback encouraged... Thanks

You need to be careful about raising the voltage only enough to help stability. Raising voltage also increases temps and running voltage too high will significantly decrease the life of the CPU. However, raising vcore to 1.55v might help you go a little higher and that setting should be plenty safe for you.

Okay Ill try it at 1.55.
Funny thing just happened. I was testing stability playing ut2003 and everything was fine. When I went to open riva tuner to see what effect the oc had on the video setting my system reset itself only this time bring me back to 800x600 and riva tuner didnt even recognize my video card. Then I checked the device manager and the video card was gone. Weird...\
I guess this is not going to be a simple tweak for everything seems to be effected by the increase in the fsb. I could see this is going to be a long ride...

It's all part of tweaking. I can overclock my vid card more when my system PCI/AGP is in spec than when I'm doing extreme system overclocking and have the PCI/AGP bus speeds cranked up.

At some point you also have to worry about the memory speed and there are a bunch of settings and ways to tweak the RAM too. It's addictive playing around with your system trying to maximize the performance.

Well I guess my wife is just going to have to live with that. I think I am already runny into memory issues already cause I just ran 3dmark2001 and the program vanished during the nature part.

Man... According to my wife I used to spend too much time on my comp before this, now I guess would be the time to check out some decent divorce lawyers.

How is the video card affected?

When I oc my fsb i get the trouble sign "!" in my device manager under the video card, and the settings get all screwed up. Riva Tuner does not even recognize my video card any longer until i reset the fsb to default. Why is that? Is there something with the agp that needs to be slowed or adjusted to accomadate the higher bus speeds?
If so, How do I balance the two?

hi,

you should have a setting in the bios called....pci lock or agp/pci lock (fix) or somthing like this.

this will keep your video card and HD in spec.

good luck and here is a tip for your wife.....

tell her that " you may be on the computer more now, but at least your not out drinking or chasing woman."

worked for me.

mica

Just don't forget to rock her world once in a while and maybe take her out to dinner occasionally.

Ill do that... Rock her world that is. I didnt see a place that had a pci/agp lock. When i change the fsb the option is "cpu host/ pci" and it makes me change the pci when i up the fsb. eg. 133/33 then 135/ 34. I looked around the bios and the only thing I saw that came close to what you mentioned was in the pci configuration and that option said "pci/agp pallett snoop" which was set to disabled. So I rolled the dice and changed to enabled, and when I tried to oc it loaded the os in 4 bit mode, and that was the highest that the video setting could go.

I know ppl are oc ing this board, joe wrote an article on this site and was able to reach the highest fsb with only lowering the rdram to x3, and was able to get 145x19 = 2755 and memory still at 145 x 4 x 2=1160.

The highest I can run stable right no is 140/ 35 x 19 = 2660 keeping my ram at x4.

If i run any higher, regardless if i lower the ram to x3 and enable that pallett snoop agp/pci The computer just resets itself over and over. Or if Im just a little above 140 It will faill during 3dmark2001.

Forgot to mention that the temps are fine, never exceeding 43c, even with stock cooler(lapped w/ as3), cooler is in he mail!

I really do not think that the Pallet Snoop effects anything that you do for OC'ing your comp. Most likely the reason that you are having video card problems is that the card does not like being over 34-35 agp bus speed. That extra number that you are seeing next to the fsb is the agp/pci bus speed and that is the one that effects all of your other components onboard your comp. Some things are more sensetive to overclocking than others. Usually most current video cards can take a pretty good overclock but evidentally yours doesnt like it. You might try setting the video card back to agp 2X, and maybe turning off fast writes. Setting these two things back usually increases stability quite a bit and has hardly any hit in how your card performs.

Just leave that palette snoop setting on default, which should be "disable". I think that just slows down your boot-up and is not needed under normal circumstances.

At 140 FSB the PCI bus should only be 35 MHz (using the 1/4 divider). The AGP bus runs at twice the PCI bus speed. Your GF4 Ti4200 should have no trouble running at 150 FSB (37.5 PCI and 75 AGP) and will probably handle even more. My guess is something else is holding you back.

Some network cards don't like to be overclocked much. Do you have one and if so, what kind? The PC1066 RDRAM might be running out of steam if you're using the 4X setting (140X4X2=1120). I'd stay go with the 3X setting if you push above 140 FSB.

That leaves cooling and voltage. While I suppose it's possible to have less than 43 degrees load CPU temps with a lapped retail cooler and Arctic Silver, especially if you have excellent case ventilation, however, I suspect that temp seems a little low for a stock heatsink. You need to check temps in real time after loading the CPU for maybe 15 minutes with Prime95 or Sandra Burn-in Wizard or something like that. I bet the real load CPU temps are more like 50 degrees.

Anyway, after you get your new cooler installed, try bumping up the vcore voltage another notch, I bet you'll get over the hump. If you're still only using the 1.55v like I initially recommended, you probably need more to get a higher overclock. Personally, I would not go any higher than 1.7v regardless of how good your cooling is, and to be very safe, maybe lower than that. But certainly, 1.6v with good cooling should be no problem. Those Northwoods start getting really power hungry when you get into the higher FSB speeds.

Allright I'll try that when I get home. I would never have guessed that the nic card could play a part in all of this. I am using a built in network that came with the board it is a realtek 8100B 10/100 mbps, and the lan is enabled using home network.

Try temporarily disabling the NIC and see what happens (should be a place in the BIOS to disable). On-board anything (video, sound, etc.) can get flakey when overclocking.

just to jump in here for a minute, I have to say that this thread is just slam full of info. Thanks to all of you who are responding. I just finished building a 2.8 P4 system, and having only ever OCed Athons, this Intel stuff helps alot.
Guess I need to update my sig now to reflect the P4 system.

Okay batboy just got home and disabled the nic, and then tried to bump up the fsb from 140 to 142 and still get 4 bit mode upon startup. I even lowered the ram to x3.

I even tried to bump up the voltage from 1.55 to 1.6 (with stock cooler still since my room and cpu was about 22c when i got home) and that didnt help.

Here is something that happened last night as I was installing 4.109 det drivers. I went to uninstall the 4.072 and noticed I never removed the previous 3.082 drivers. When I went to uninstall the 3.082 my computer would lock. Tried again and same thing... Finally got tired of the lock ups and installed the 4.109 drivers anyways. Do you think this could be driver related since I didnt fully uninstall the 3.082 prior to either the 4.072 or 4.109?

Not a problem with the drivers. Removed all old drivers and still go into 4 bit mode when I start at anything higher than 140.

Finally!
Well batboy the problem is solved. I beleive the problem was the fact that my video card memory clock was set too high.

I tweaked the card while fsb was normal which in my case was 300/ 567. So this time I set every thing back to default, except for my memory which I kept a x3. I bumped up fsb little by little just seeing if it would get past a single pass of 3dmark2001 and sandra (cpu portion). No problems there,and I was able to go all the way that my bios would allow (156/ 39) with the only problem being reboots, and that seemed to be solved when I raised the voltage to 1.6.

Every thing seems to be stable I ran the 3dmark2001 (looped 5 time) UT2003 (twice) and ran sandra's cpu portion for about 20 minutes. All ROCK SOLID...

Now my only cocern are my temps. While I did all of this my temps during full load ranged from 42-46 degrees, which seem low right? This is still with my lapped retail cooler (Ill be getting the vantec aeroflow Mon). What would be a cheap route in getting acurate probes, so that I can be sure my temps are correct? Also is there a way to calibrate the built in sensors using mbm5?

Just jotting down everything I had in my head now, and will probally hear from you Monday. Thanks for all of your help, and hope this helped others too.
Later...