overclock

  • Thread starter Thread starter BigKahuna
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BigKahuna

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I've seen a couple references to overclocking ...
How is this accomplished and ...
If a guy (me) doesn't know much about it ... should he screw around with stuff like this or just leave it alone?
I have a 366Mhz celeron... which is so far working fine ... but a little more juice is always a good thing ... right?
 
Some chips are better at overclocking than others, I can't remember whether the 366 was good or bad for that. But a bit of info:

When chips are manufactured, they come off the same assembly line (more or less), and tested for max frequency. Sometimes a batch of chips will be capable of handling much higher MHz - than what is stamped on it. So these chips hit the market as, the classic example - Celeron 300A which are easily overclockable to 450MHz.

The celeron 366 is designed for running on a 66MHz bus, with a multiplier of 5.5 (5.5x66=366). If you wanted to get more MHz, you increase the bus speed (the multiplier is locked). Ideally, if you could run it at 550MHz using a 100MHz bus setting, your PCI bus would still be running at 33.3MHz. If 100MHz didn't work (unlikely it will) 83MHz, or maybe 75MHz, but you are overclocking the PCI bus at this point, and may or may not experience problems.

Also, ease or difficulty depends a lot on your motherboard, a lot of boards are using some sortof soft menu interface, through the BIOS instead of using jumpers. So this can speed up the experiments.

With a 366, I don't think the extra 91MHz is going to do much for you, messing around with the PCI bus speed is not something I would feel safe doing when trying to record audio. There are already more than enough ways of creating errors with DAW's.

If it's working fine for you now, don't bother. Better to buy a Celeron 600MHz, they are cheap enough. Or wait until you really need the extra horsepower and upgrade at that point as chip prices always(usually)drop.
 
Thanks for the great explanation, Emeric. I appreciate it.
Sounds like something I shouldn't really mess with ... but it's good to know what you guys are referring to when you mention it. :)
Thanks again!
 
hey, I have a celeron 366. Its am old slot 1 type, and Im running it @ 412. I could go higher, but then my PCI bus would be running to hot for me to like. (I have a Mixtreme and I hear theyre intolerant of high speeds...)

anyway, the socket7 celeron 366s are what first set off this whole overclocking thing, cuz there was a batch out of malaysia a few years ago that ran to 550, no problem, so I say try it.

worst case senario: you kill all your PCI stuff.

xoxo
 
i am running a amd k6-2 350 mhz processor.i originally had 64 mb ram.i kicked it up to 400 mhz for a while,and it ran ok,but i got a few more blue screens and the system was generally less stable,so i set it back to 350.if you are really looking for a performance boost,add ram.when i added another 128 mb of ram,the systems performance increased like mad.unfortunately,my original 64 mb modole blew a gasket the other day so i dropped from 196 mb to 128 mb :(.....good luck
 
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