my athlon 550 wont overclock, why?

I changed the speed of the cpu in bios from 100mhz to 120mhz then to 133mhz, but when I save the bios the computer restarts and my monitor doesnt come on.

I have to reset the bios using the jumper.

Why wont it over clock, any advice would be really helpfull.

Neomorpheous

Welcome to the forums!

I think you are just going past your chips.memory , and or chipsets ability , what kind of motherboard is it,also what kind of ram?I would download cpufsb if I were you then you can do it 1MHZ at a time instead of going from 100 straight to 120 , thats a pretty big jump.

wildone

its a gigabyte motherboard, running 133mhz ram.

its one of those silly athlon processors that look like nintendo game cartridges

Do you know which gigabyte it is?
I would download CPUFSB and if its listed you can overclock from within windows and maybe more options then your bios does,also I am not really that familiar with the regular athlon chipsets but someone will help if I cant.

wildone

OKay Athlon 550 owner steping in...
(puts on Mr.Kewl tone ) Ok man I have a Athlon 550...( I just have a Soyo K7VIA mobo) I know its a slot A version because you described it as a cartridge.
Soo..You either have the AMD chipset OR the Via chipset on your Gigabyte mobo ( wish I new which one), I went to the gigabyte site but somethings up with it...
Anyway with either chipset (AMD's or the VIA KX133) you will be lucky if u reach 120mhz ( its VERY RARE) FSB, I can only reach 111mhz which is considered very lucky as its stable. Even if you have pc133 memory it will not help as the chipset is the bottleneck on the FSB, BUT on most motherboards there is an option to enable 133mhz on the memory only. This will help with the AGPs access to the memory, since it has direct access to it thus helping out memory to video card memory operations and vica versa. Now the cpus run reasonabley cool..i never go above 36 C, even before I modded my heatsink with 2 huge fans pushing more than enough air. Also it helps alot to remove teh plastic caseing from the AThlon cpu as heat builds up bewteen the cpus PCB and heattransferplate. And since teh 550mhz Athlons were classics there cache mem chips are not built into teh cpu like the thunderbirds (yes there was a Slot A version), teh classics chips are located on the PCB and they need cooling as well. But not as much as teh cpus core.

here is how u remove the Athlons caseing.

http://www.thetechzone.com/articles/how_to/athlon_case_removal/index.html

Also if you look around you may be able to find a GFD (Gold Finger Device) which makes it possible to change the multiplyer to increase speed ( though it is limited of course) I have been unable to find any..i was going to get one from http://www.k7oc.com but if u go there u can see they are not taking orders anymore.

Well if you need anymore info let me know.

Try 110 or 115 FSB before. I had an Athlon 550 with a Gigabyte motherboard like you 2 years ago and it wouldn't run higher than 633MHz (5.5X115).

^^^^^

whooo 115 thatz nice...

..

Dude.. You gotta UPDATE Ur bios..


Lata

it's all in my sig. of course that's a 750 with a 900 core that i changed multiplier by soldering on the pcb. anyway. my gigabyte ga-7vm would only support 3 fsb's because of a limitation on the pll. these were 100, 110, 115. thing was if i changed them in the bios i had to clear cmos to start up again, same as you. gigabyte has a nifty program just for their boards and just for this problem. i was able to run 115 with no problem but no higher. the program is easytune and it will make things very easy for you by autodetecting chipset and pll and all possible fsb's. works very well and has a nice interface good luck