Overclocking PII-333 to 450Mhz
by Eric Kovalsky
Because I wanted the most bang for the buck out of my system, I
ordered a
PII-333 (which has multipliers up to 5.5x enabled), an Abit BX6 (which
allows fine tuning of Vcore and easy setting of 66/100 FSB), and a lot of
cheap generic PC100 memory (LGS -7J chips, total 384MB). After installing
Win98 on the new machine I began to overclock. I went immediately to 400
mHz (4x100) with no trouble at all, subsequently enabled turbo mode to 412
mHz (4x103) which also worked flawlessly. After running at this speed for
a week or so I decided to see how much further I could go. I tried 448 mHz
(4x112) which would crash immediately when Win98 started. This speed would
work with the L2 cache enabled, but obviously this involved a big
performance hit and I went back to 4x103. Later I got the idea to try
4.5x100. Surprisingly this worked very well, there were a few crashes
which I got around by raising Vcore to 2.1 and ultimately to 2.2v. So
right now I am running at 4.5x100 with Vcore at 2.2, L2 cache enabled, and
CAS latency 2, and I paid less for the the mobo, CPU, and RAM that a new
PII-450!!
I have tried 464 mHz (4.5x103) but it is slightly unstable so I do not use
it generally. Dropping CAS to 3 and increasing Vcore to 2.4v, 464 mHz is
achieveable, but I suspect the frequent crashes are related to L2 cache
problems. Most of the crashes occur with Netscape/IE4. Unreal also
crashes after a few minutes. However, Bryce3D and Quake II run just fine.
Moral of this story: Buy a cheap CPU and an Abit board and overclock it to
get the performance of a much more expensive CPU. Also, if you have a 333
and cannot run at 4x112, give 4.5x100 a try. I'm not sure why it works but
it does and it is very, very fast.
S-specs on my CPU: PII-333, SL2KA (Phillippines), dA0
13 September 1998 11:39 AM
