How fast should watercooled P4 3.4 be?

[Greg555]

Hi guys.

I've been building Pc's for few years now but I don't know much about overclocking other that the standard "Automatic" overclocking in bios.

I am running at 3.74 but I am sure this should be done better.

Sys is P4/3.4CGHz 800M 478P/512K HT watercolled with aquariusIII 1GB of corsair XMS Extreme Memory PC-4000PRO Asus P4C800 DELUXE

What is the proper way to overclock it other that the automatic overclock feature in BIOS and to what levels?

Thanks

Greg

 

[larva]

In your case there are only a few adjustments to make. First would the FSB (front side bus), or main system bus connecting the CPU to the motherboard. This is 200MHz (800MHz transfer rate, four transfers per clock cycle) by default, and your CPU has a fixed 17x multiplier to create 3.4GHz from it.

Since you cannot change CPU multipliers with your CPU, you must increase the FSB frequency to a value greater than the default 200, so that once multiplied by the 17 the result exceeds 3400. 235MHz FSB is 4GHz, above the potential of any Northwood P4 I've heard of on water.

Since you need no more than 235MHz FSB, you don't have to worry about your memory limiting you. You need to run it in the default 1:1 (or 400MHz in Asus-speak) mode, where the memory bus clock is the same as the FSB. Your ram is rated for 500MHz, which is a 250FSB in 1:1 mode. 235FSB will run the memory at an effective 470MHz. Set memory voltage to ~2.8V to insure stability, you can try decreasing it later.

As you increase the CPU's clock rate above default, increased core voltage will likely be necessary for it to operate with stability. Try increasing the CPU voltage to ~1.65V anytime the machine crashes or locks up to see if more voltage can stabilize the problem. Run the voltage as low as stability allows, but up to 1.65V is safe enough.

You may benefit from increasing the AGP voltage a tad--1.6V should be enough.

Make sure to realistically evaluate the machine's operating temperatures to make sure that extra cooling isn't mandated by the increased clock rates and voltages.

 

[Greg555]

Thanks BIG WORM

I'll try that