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Pentium Northwood 1.6a ghz/512/400/1.5v
- Thread starter crxsi71
- Start date
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2012
- Location
- Phoenix, Az
you'll need a Socket 478 compatible cooler, of course which one is up to you. Since this will be a 10yo, cheap overclock, i suggest you stay with fan/heat-sink.
The Northwood, like most Pentiums is a locked multiplier, which means the only real overclocking you can do with it is to bump the FSB up (the CPU voltage and Ram Voltage and speeds can be tinkered with to increase stability at the higher clock speeds). Don't quote me on this, because it's been about a decade, but i'm pretty sure you can take the FSB of one of those up from 100mhz to 143mhz (which will bring you into something like 2.3ghz range). Past that it gets a bit iffy, and will come down to the mb, ram, cooling and cpu; but i've heard about people getting one up to nearly 3ghz (I know for certain you should be able to, with some tweeking, get it up to 2.6ghz)
Of course when this was released i was busy overclocking athlon cpus, and only eyed one before going back to overclocking my athlons. So i'm not an authority on overclocking one of these.
The Northwood, like most Pentiums is a locked multiplier, which means the only real overclocking you can do with it is to bump the FSB up (the CPU voltage and Ram Voltage and speeds can be tinkered with to increase stability at the higher clock speeds). Don't quote me on this, because it's been about a decade, but i'm pretty sure you can take the FSB of one of those up from 100mhz to 143mhz (which will bring you into something like 2.3ghz range). Past that it gets a bit iffy, and will come down to the mb, ram, cooling and cpu; but i've heard about people getting one up to nearly 3ghz (I know for certain you should be able to, with some tweeking, get it up to 2.6ghz)
Of course when this was released i was busy overclocking athlon cpus, and only eyed one before going back to overclocking my athlons. So i'm not an authority on overclocking one of these.
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2012
- Location
- Phoenix, Az
Asus P4C 800 Deluxe is apparently the best oc board for a socket 478... of course this is just knowledge found from google searching. as i said, i wasn't into celeron oc'ing back in the day.
Except the $$ you put into components to make the system. Burning the chip itself may not be a big loss, but it will be if you spend $250 to get a PATA drive(S), DDR1 memory and an AGP video card to go with it.
With such minimal info it's hard to give much advice but I will say these two bits.
First a 400 bus with a 512k cache implies Northwood "A" which is less susceptible to SNDS compared to the pre-A version. So you won't have to get too paranoid about burning your core but you should do some research on safe voltage limits.
Second, there are still a few aftermarket coolers out there that will fit a 478 format as well as more modern ones like 775, 1366 or 1155, so if you want to get an aftermarket cooler you could find one that will help you push the Northwood now and still be used in a future build.
You will need board that supports northwood 400 and best if something on Intel chipset like i865 or 875 with chance to raise vcore. Some i848 boards are ok too like ASUS P4P800-X and should be much cheaper but also have max vcore about 1.7V. Thats for daily oc, not max possible clock on this cpu.
For max clock you will need ASUS P4P800E, P4C800/E, Abit IC7/G ( don't remember if this one was supporting 400 FSB northwoods ) or Abit IS7/E.
Cpu should go up to 166 FSB on air cooling so you get ~2.50-2.65GHz. For that you don't need fast memory as chance for high memory clock is dropping after you set high FSB ( and many boards don't even have higher ratio ). Generally for 166FSB all you need is DDR333 or 400 which will be probably working as 333 anyway.
CPU is 1.50V and I wouldn't set higher than 1.70V if you want to use it daily not only for max oc. For max oc you have to set 1.85V+ and use sub zero cooling.
AGP card, memory, more standard board and IDE HDD should cost no more than $85 ( depends from luck
).
I would think about something else like A64 setup which will cost about the same and will be much faster.
Here is my result from september this year. Single stage cooling ( ~ -45*C idle ), Abit IS7, 1.88V ( 1.85V max in BIOS ), 2x Kingston HyperX 400 2-2-2-5 but board couldn't boot on tighter timings than 2.5-3-3-5.
For max clock you will need ASUS P4P800E, P4C800/E, Abit IC7/G ( don't remember if this one was supporting 400 FSB northwoods ) or Abit IS7/E.
Cpu should go up to 166 FSB on air cooling so you get ~2.50-2.65GHz. For that you don't need fast memory as chance for high memory clock is dropping after you set high FSB ( and many boards don't even have higher ratio ). Generally for 166FSB all you need is DDR333 or 400 which will be probably working as 333 anyway.
CPU is 1.50V and I wouldn't set higher than 1.70V if you want to use it daily not only for max oc. For max oc you have to set 1.85V+ and use sub zero cooling.
AGP card, memory, more standard board and IDE HDD should cost no more than $85 ( depends from luck
).I would think about something else like A64 setup which will cost about the same and will be much faster.
Here is my result from september this year. Single stage cooling ( ~ -45*C idle ), Abit IS7, 1.88V ( 1.85V max in BIOS ), 2x Kingston HyperX 400 2-2-2-5 but board couldn't boot on tighter timings than 2.5-3-3-5.
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