OvaKilla said:
thanks falcon, that helps me out a real lot!
can you make small increments to the multiplier and fsb? i always see people make .5 changes to the multiplier but i never see 14.2 or 13.7. and the fsb, can you raise it by just 1 or 2?
Well, for the most part, cpus come with the multi locked. Intel locks theirs. Amd is is different story, my knowledge of amd's only goes up to the athlon xp's/mp's. with these, you can unlock the multi by doing some modifications to the processor. hopefully someone with knowledge of amd64's will respond and tell you about them, but im sure there is a way that you can change the multi on them as well. intel's new line has a type of "speedstep", in which the processor drops its multi down to reduce cpu heat when its not in use. there are some tricks that can be done in order to keep the multi lower.
amd's multi's for athlon xp's have the .5 (10, 10.5, 11, 11.5, etc), while as far as i know, the 64's have whole numbers (8,9,10,etc.).
intel's multi's are whole for modern processors as well (older ones, such as pIII and lower had halfed also), but p4's go whole (16,17,18, etc).
the fsb can be adjusted by 1 mhz increment (thats if the motherboard supports it, some have just huge jumps, like 100, 133, 200)
OvaKilla said:
why does it seem like its alot harder to get results when oc'ing the fsb than it is with the multiplier? it seems alot more intricate and i see people simply bumping up the multi to do their oc but when they try through with the fsb, they get instability and a bunch of other problems. i know it has to do with the ram, do you need to have the ram speed match your fsb? thanks again falcon.
when you oc with fsb (for example, most of us intel guys, have no choice), you are not only overclocking the cpu, but also the ram (unless you set it on a divider). when you up the multiplier, you only stress the cpu in the overclock. people love to oc with the fsb because it gives much more performance then just changing the multiplier.
ideally, its good to have ram that is faster than the stock fsb on the processor, this will give you much more headroom to oc and not be a bottleneck. this is because setting the memory at a 1:1 ratio with the fsb is much better performance then setting it on a divider (5:4 ie. 250fsb and 200memory). with the increase in fsb, the memory goes up as well. the faster the memory operates, the more bandwidth it has, therefore you whole system feels faster.
when you oc, remember to lock the pci/agp speed to the default (33/66), or in newer systems, lock the pcie/sata (100mhz), because if you dont, this goes up with the increase in fsb. and if you go out of spec, then you will get instability from other things (harddrive will give errors, since the chip is operating out of spec, the video card will start bugging out).
hope that helps, ask away if there is any more info you need. btw, do you know the system specs of the machine that you are going to oc?
edit: congrats on your star
to the forums!!
