Coppermine Overclocking Tips

So you want to overclock a CuMIne with a BX board? Helpful hints.

Things to remember:

1) What PCI divisor is your machine using? If you are trying to run at 115 MHz or better, and your motherboard allows you to use a /4 divisor; use it! Otherwise, you are overclocking every PCI device, and once you get above 120 MHz, a lot of them don’t like that at all.

2) AGP video cards are the biggest challenge to overclocking a CuMine on a BX board. Unlike the PCI divisor on recently produced BX boards, you can’t lower the AGP/bus ratio below 2/3. Some video cards just won’t run at 133Mhz or better. Others will, but you may find that it changes to AGP 1X mode, which may defeat the purpose of the whole exercise for gamers. If that is the case, you can:

    a) Buy a PCI video card like a Voodoo 3, which may or may not suit your purposes.
    b) Buy a new motherboard that will let you run AGP video at a ration of 1/2. The Apollo Pro and Pro+ motherboards are the only ones that let you do that right now, and motherboards based on Intel’s Solano chipset should be out within a couple months.
    c) Do neither, and wait for the first Coppermine-128s to come out (provided your motherboard can handle the lower voltage). The first couple are supposed to run at a 66 MHz bus, and they might well be able to run at 100Mhz, so you could end up having it run at 850 MHz (though with the higher multiplier and lower bus speed it will probably perform about 8-10% worse than a regular CuMine running at the same speed at a bus of 150 MHz) or better at 100 MHz without changing anything. Even if the initial 566 Coppermine-128s can’t quite get to 850, if you have a motherboard that gives you setting above 83 MHz with a PCI divisor of 3, you may be able to still overclock the processor quite a bit.

3) See how well others have done with the same memory you have. Some memory can run a lot faster than its rated speed. Some can’t. If you have older RAM, you might want to check BX Boards to see how others have done with your RAM. Those shopping for newer RAM can look at BX Boards on PC 133 and a couple of Anand’s articles on the subject.

No guarantees unless the RAM is rated at the speed you want to hit, just likelihoods.

Good luck!

Email Ed


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