NOOB help with OC'ing a 2.4C Northwood LONG POST

[rochellcommaj]

OK, Here it goes. I'm going to describe what's going on and try to see if I'm in danger of damaging my cpu. I'm a noob to the forum and just discovered it last night but it looks like there's alot of good info on it. This is a long one, so grab a cup of coffee, grab a beer , light a cigarette, or whatever you need to do to prepare for my long winded post. I look forward to getting sound advice from this fine forum.

My mother's computer was recently wiped out when the house was struck by lightning lately. So, she called me to build her one (as the rest of my family does) Stating that the insurance agency was going to pay for replacement. I got to looking around on the EGG for a setup for her to run. I had recently switched to Intel processors for hopes of better stability. Turns out it was nice. I had picked up a p4 northwood 2.26 about six months ago for a bargain price with a gigabyte board. I liked the stability and suggested that she try the P4 lineup herself this time around. She did have a Athlon 2500 barton core.
This is where I got my mind wondering.... I was cruising the EGG looking for parts to assemble her a new system. While snooping around and looking for a good P4 motherboard, I noticed a couple of articles about oc'ing P4's on the ASUS P4P800 boards. Thinking back to the good days ( celery 300a oc'd to 450) my gears started turning. I read a few post by people oc'ing the P4 2.4c to 3.0 and up. Sounded like fun. I figured since all she needed was a reciept for the parts replaced and all she does is surf dialup via aol, I'd get something I wanted and swap her out after the insurance thing was settled. She agreed and I was off to put something together.

Here's the setup. I used some things I had allready and put the new stuff in the comp too.

Processor: P4 2.4C Northwood (I think. I thought I had gotten an prescott processor when I ordered it, but upon running CPU Z it states it as a northwood.) with the 800 fsb OEM
Motherboard: ASUS P4P800 SE
Memory: PQI TURBO PC3200DDR 2X512MB *( I had never heard of this brand and dont know much about ram timings. It had some good reviews from users on the egg and the heat spreaders and price were a plus. the timings on it are 2.5 3 3 7 whatever that means. ((sorry, I've been sleeping as far as keeping up with technology lately)))
Hard drive: Western Digital 160 mb with the 8mb buffer
Video: ATI AIW9600XT
CD/DVD Drives: Plextor PlexWriter premium
Sony DVD burner model 72X-something or other
CPU cooler: Cooler Master Aero 4 lite with variable fan control.

Ok, So all the parts came in and I get to tinkering around. I put the system together and start doing a few baseline benchmarks. Using PCMARK04, 3DMARK2001, and 3DMARK03 just to see if there was anything that would cause some hiccups. All's well and running fine.

I decide now it's time to try a little overclocking. Well, the bios has an AI overclocking feature it's called and I tried it. with a thirty percent overclock it all ran. I thought " Great. This is easy.... but wait.... if it's running fine just by selecting this auto thing, I wonder how much I can squeeze out of it?" and from there the games began.

I don't want to tweak voltage and risk burning my CPU right off of the start. So, I like to see what I can get out of it first. Just playing around with the settings in the bios and doing a little research on Tom's hardware, I was able to tweak my ram settings and see a little performance boost before I started playing with the FSB. To make an already long story a little shorter, Here's what I got it to, and the beginning of my questions.

I (at the time) was thinking I had a Prescott based CPU. After reading how these CPU's run hotter than the Northwoods like the one I had, I was shocked to see an Idle temp of 89-91 degrees F. It was starting to remind me of the Northwood 2.26 I have. I had disabled the CPU internal thermal control in the bios just to see how hot the CPU would get and the highest I could get it under a 100% load (according to task manager) was around 112 degrees F.

So, leaving the CPU internal thermal control disabled, I began to increase the CPU FSB setting. I got to 270 before running into stability issues. So, I think I might just leave it there with a reported 3.25 ghz rating according to sisoft sandra lite. I ran Folding@home, Seti@home and BurnInTest 4.0 by passmark all at the same time. I figured this ought to get the temps up as window's task manager was reporting 100% load on both virtual cpu's keeping the graph pegged at the top with no dips in it. The highest CPU temp reported by the ASUS Probe software was 122 Degrees F with the CPU fan on low. With it running a full 3500 rpm, It topped out @ a reported 117 degrees F. So, Here's the before and after benchmarks, and the questions.

3DMARK2001: 10995 Stock
14999 3.25

3DMARK03: 3473 Stock
4133 3.25


PCMARK04: 3764 Stock
5007 3.25

System Information as reported by CPU Z
Processor Information:
NAME: INTEL PENTIUM 4
CODE NAME NORTHWOOD
BRAND ID: 9
TECHNOLOGY: 0.13u
VOLTAGE: 1.568 fluctuating to 1.616 (Is this normal? or is it a bad sign?)
SPECIFICATION: INTEL(R) PENTIUM (R) 4 CPU 2.40 GHZ
FAMMILY: F
MODEL: 2
STEPPING: 9
EXT. FAMILY: 0
EXT.MODEL: 0
REVISION: D1

CLOCKS:
CORE SPEED:3244.8
MULTIPLIER: 12X
FSB: 270.4
BUS SPEED: 1081.6
Questions:

When I enable the CPU internal thermal protection, the computer crashes. It will reboot and the bios says something about overclocking failed. Is there a safeguard in P4's where when the thermal protection is enabled it limits the overclocking abilities of the processor?

Is CPU internal thermal protection another name for the "throttling" feature of P4's?

The bios reorted the stock cpu voltage as 1.55v. I locked it down to this in the manual setting as I was not sure if the auto would increase it to try and keep up with overclocking. Is this the right voltage for the "Northwood core P4 I have?"

What other software should I download to test: maximum stablilty, report accurate processor information, system state, and anything I might need to check out? (ex. Benchmarking progs, burn in progs, information utilities like CPU Z.)

Does this seem to be a good overclock for a Northwood core P4?

Am I in danger of the so called "Northwood Sudden Death Syndrome"?

What changes could I make to my system to make it better, or overclock it more efficently?

How do I do screen captures as I have seen of such things like CPU Z info like I've seen in other threads?

Are these temps I've mentioned it's running at OK?

I've always been an AMD man every since the k6 2's. I've used to work for Micron computers in the repair department troubleshooting and repairing comps that failed burn in or final test. So, I have a pretty decent understanding of computers. Albeit it's been back when the 233 mhz pentiums were king of the hill. I had even played around with overclocking some of the 166mhz systems to 233 when there were not any computers to be repaired. Waste of time I know. I had a celeron 300a that I ran @ 450 mhz for the longest. When I finally upgraded, it was to an athlon slot one something or other and I had tweaked a little. Then I went to a thoroughbred core amd and decided do quit with the amd thing after watching a THG video of a couple athlons frying theirselves and a P4 saving itself after removing heatsinks. We had a little earthquake locally and it shook my heatsink on my athlon a little crooked and I lost that processor. Ran a barton for a little while and finally switched to intel.



I apologize for being so long winded, but I wanted to be as thorough as I could be. This is my first post and I look forward to all the responses.

Thanks in advance for all the help you guys are gonna give me so I can get this thing really rocking

 

[Helsyeah]

let me be the first to say WELCOME TO THE FORUMS!!

Is CPU internal thermal protection another name for the "throttling" feature of P4's?

throttling is typically a problem with presscott core processors. The "C" in your 2.4C processor denotes it as a northwood core processor. I actually have never heard of turning on the mobo thermal managment causing instability, perhaps someone else can shed some light on this.

Is this the right voltage for the "Northwood core P4 I have?"

the default voltage for northbridge processors is 1.525 volts. I believe SDNS or GNDS usually occurs at core voltages in excess of 1.6 to 1.65 volts and a combination of temperatures exceeding 50 degrees C for long periods of time.

What other software should I download to test: maximum stablilty, report accurate processor information, system state, and anything I might need to check out? (ex. Benchmarking progs, burn in progs, information utilities like CPU Z.)

Many people, myself included, use two instances of prime95 to test the stabilty of our processors. This program will error out and report the error if there is an instability with your processor or even your memory.

Does this seem to be a good overclock for a Northwood core P4?

this is decent for a 2.4c processor, most do at least 3.2ghz some up to and beyond 3.6

Am I in danger of the so called "Northwood Sudden Death Syndrome"?

not at the voltage and temperatures that you are reporting.

What changes could I make to my system to make it better, or overclock it more efficently?

there are several fairly informative guides on how to squeeze the most out of your intel system. Specifically you can reduce your ram divider to find the max that your processor will do and then switch to the 1:1 (400mhz on your board) divider to find the max that your ram will do. Then find knowing this you can find the best choice in FSB speed and the best divider for the ram.

How do I do screen captures as I have seen of such things like CPU Z info like I've seen in other threads?

press printscreen, and open up ms paint, and paste. This will drop the screen capture into paint and then you can edit it and save it as a jpg from there.

Are these temps I've mentioned it's running at OK?

these temps look just fine. Asus boards tend to read temperatures a bit low, around 5 to 10 degrees C though.

Im certain you will get more responses and help other than the brief response that i could offer to your lenthy thread. Also i would recomment in joining our Folding@Home team. You can find all about folding here

Once again welcome, enjoy the stay

 

[rochellcommaj]

Thank you for the help so far. In my bios I didn't see a divider for the cpu/fsb. I don't know if it's on this board or not. I've heard about features that are on the p4p800 deluxe that arent in my bios. Shoulda got the deluxe version I guess.

Thanks for the tip on the printscreen function. I'll get copys of the shots from cpu z and post them when I get home. Then maybe you guys can let me in on some tips to get things running better. I had it running at 3.4 g for a little while, but I had an issue with random crashes. I don't know if the processor was in error, or if it was the memory. Kinda wish I would have gotten a faster memory. I didn't realize that memory rated faster than 3200 could be run in my mainboard.

I just want to get this thing tweaked and screaming. Which it's doing a pretty good job of it now. I can't believe the value of this chip. Price vs. Performance wise. I'm thinking about getting another mother board that has a cpu/ram divisor so I can tweak the fsb to the max.

Keep the tips coming!

 

[rochellcommaj]

Oh yea, I forgot to mention, the chip is one manufactured in china. I didin't know they made ones in china. Do they have a reputation for being bad or good or anything? Just wondering if that made a difference.

 

[Lancelot]

Your P4P800 board has a CPU-RAM divider. Look for DDR or memory speed. 400=1:1 320=5:4 and the most lowest setting is 3:2. Don't be so impatient man! Overclocking is all about taking LOTS of time and going step by step. It takes weeks/months to get your system tweaked to the max. and even then you may still discover some minor things to tweak as you go along. See my signature, this is my 24/7 100% stable setup, it didn't come to that in like 2 days...

 

[batboy]

Welcome to the O/C addiction. Looks like I'm a little late to the party. You have been given some good advise already. We generally report temps in C. since we have international members.

Looks like you got a good CPU. Most newer Northwoods have a default vcore of 1.525v, but some are 1.55v default (older ones might be 1.5v). Temps look good so far, but if you do some case ventilation improvements, then you could raise vcore up some more. You should be perfectly safe at 1.6v actual, but measure it at idle and under load since Asus tends to overvolt at idle and droop under load. Do not run actual vcore above 1.65v for long periods of time.

That RAM should be good. I think it uses TCCD chips which are the desired stuff for overclocking right now. I would manually set the memory ratio to 5:4 (320 in the Asus BIOS). Maybe give the vdimm a bump to 2.7v. I would leave the memory timings set to SPD until you find the limits of your system, then you can tweak the timing manually to fine tune your system for optimal performance.

 

[rochellcommaj]

Your P4P800 board has a CPU-RAM divider. Look for DDR or memory speed. 400=1:1 320=5:4 and the most lowest setting is 3:2. Don't be so impatient man! Overclocking is all about taking LOTS of time and going step by step. It takes weeks/months to get your system tweaked to the max. and even then you may still discover some minor things to tweak as you go along. See my signature, this is my 24/7 100% stable setup, it didn't come to that in like 2 days...

AAH, so that's what that setting is for. Sorry to have gotten all excited guys. I've just been out of the scene for a while and the o'c I got allready has bit me hard.

I think I have some problems with voltage. I might change out my power supply. I have an antec smart power in another comp that isnt overclocked. This power supply hasn't shown any issues until I started running Prime95 in the high power consumption mode. I ran prime 95 with the memory intensive function last night for 8 hours without error. I started running seti at home and Prime95 errored out within a couple minutes. I'm trying to see if I can get it to do it again. But I've been running the cpu fan on high this time. I'm trying to see if maybe the cpu was actually getting too hot.

I'm fairly new to this type of forum setup. How do I post the images of screen shots I've taken? I've got a few from where the prime95 crashed. If I can figure this out, I can post the pics of voltage/temps at the failure time.


Thanks again, and I'm sorry for seeming in such a hurry.

 

[rochellcommaj]

well I figured out how to upload them, I just dont know how to include them in the post. Here's links though to the failure and I've been able to make it fail. I turned down the cpu fan and It's failed. I think that 50C is the area I'm having problems with then. Maybe it's something else, but it's ran fine as Long as I have the fan on high and keep my temps arround 113F. I'll try to get my temps converted. It'll take me a little bit to become acustomed to it.

Check out these screen shots and tell me whats your thought on the sitation is. If you can think of another thing I need to run and get a shot of, Let me know and I'll do it.

*edit I've been running torture test without error for an hour with the fan on high. I thought I would be smart and open an second instance of prime95 and run it also on torture test large fft and It would error out. I start it up and the other would error out back and forth like that. Should I be happy if I can get one instance of prime to run without erroring out? I didn't know if running something else like seti@home while running prime95 was a no no. Just wondering.