Overclocking my buddys ancient P3, help plz.

Hey,

My friend has this old computer that was made for them, so I'm pretty sure I could OC it, the case luckilly has a front 80mm intake and a pl;ace for a 80mm exhaust in the back. I figure if we put fans in there it should take care of cooling as long as we dont OC to much.

I think its a 400 MHz P3, pretty slow. How much do you think we could OC it to?

To OC i need to go in the bios do i have to change the multiplier or is that locked? OR do I have to make the FSB higher? And should I increase the voltage???

I need a bit of help on this plz.

thanks.

I once had a P3 450MHz and was able to OC it to 583MHz.

Could you gimme some tips/instructions on how u did it please

First, you need to figure out what motherboard and CPU you have. Maybe start with CPU-Z. Intel never made a 400 P-III. Multiplier will be locked, so you have to raise FSB. See if the BIOS has settings to change the FSB.

450 was lowest P3 but I could be crazy.

if 4.5x100 then 4.5x133 would rock.

6x100s all did 6x133 for 800mhz which is a nice stable increase.

If it's a 400, then it's a P-II. The first P-III processors were Katmai cores and they didn't O/C that well, especially compared to the later Coppermine. If it's a Kat, then if you hit anything close to 600 MHz, you are doing very good.

Katmai's were lucky to make it past 75MHz on the overclock. I agree with Batboy, if you make anywhere to 600MHz overclock on a Katmai you are doing well. They also ran extremely hot from a 2.0V core.

The PIII 600's that were coppermine would usually easily make it to 800MHz and often higher.

The Pentium 2 Deschutes or Katmai 400mhz is likely what you have or perhaps an ES PIII on the 4 X multiplier. Possibly the other chance might be that you have a low voltage PIII 400 (made for notebooks) fitted to a converter that deals with the voltage inability of the motherboard. Possible but unlikely.

Best bet is a Katmai or Deschutes PII and both do not overclock all that well. You can easily tell as the Deschutes and Katmai have a 512K cache off chip running at 1/2 system bus.

R