I would like to start overclocking but I'm kind of scared..

Hello I have an Althon 2600+ but I am soon going to get a 3500+ 64. I would like to overclock before I put my processor and board in the closet. I do not want to kill/destroy anything, I would just like to tweak it slightly. I have a Soltek board that allows an option to Auto-Overclock, is this safe or should I just do it on my own? I know very little about overclocking except I do know that you are supposed to raise the front side bus with something and tweak the multipliter. I am quite confused right now but I'd like to raise just a hair - just for kicks, just to say "I overclocked my hardware once". Remember: I do not/cannot destroy anything, what's the safest way of doing this? (yes, I know that there's no safe way to overclock hardware). Thanks.

:D :twisted:

I used the Soltek Auto Overclocking feature (RedStorm) and I am estatic, it worked wonderfully and now my processor is running at 50 C in a hot room instead of the usual 55-60 C (not good) temp.

I went into the bios and selected to use the redstorm, it browsed around a bit, found the system's limits and then kept upping the mhz. When it stopped it rebooted and now everything is cool.

You know.. I have an old test box I just built with an Athlon 1000 that my dad actually underclocked because we ran it in 100+ F rooms, I'm right next to the air vents with this thing and it would be a nice overclocking experience to practice on and such. Any advice? Thanks.

UPDATE: It now looks as though I'm using an Athlon 2700+ reading from my hardware system info :twisted:

You overclocking :twisted: you.......... :lol:

I had a Barton 2500+ running at 3200+ speeds as my Linux rig until I went to dual booting my Xeon system. All I did is change the the FSB from 333 to 400Mhz, the temperature never changed. :D

The specs are half way down this page.
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/topic-35981-48.html

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LondoJowo

I had a Barton 2500+ running at 3200+ speeds as my Linux rig until I went to dual booting my Xeon system. All I did is change the the FSB from 333 to 400Mhz, the temperature never changed. :D

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:shock:

Do you think I could make my system into a 3200+? This would save me a lot of cash (I was going to buy an AMD 64 3200+ actually). So do you think my Athlon 2600+ (2700+ now) can stand such a huge jump like that? I just change the front side bus to 400mhz or what? Again, I'm very nervous about breaking something here, and I have never truely overclocked anything considering I used the RedStorm feature by Soltek.

Would I hair raise it little by little until it's a 3200? Or just a huge jump to it? What are the long term effects of doing this? If you push your processor to the limits while overclocking, isn't it very well possible that you shorten your proc. life by a year or something? What happens when you really screw up? Boots to black screen, processor catches aflame, etc. ? Thanks for the info.

What Soltek motherboard do you have? From my experience you can normally get a 15 - 20% overclock without hurting the processor as long as you have decent cooling. Most cases the memory is what holds you back. I had PC3200 memory so the memory was running at stock speed, the only part that was actually overclocked was the processor.

I honestly can't recall the model of the board :oops: It's fairly new-ish though I believe..

I have 1GB of Crucial RAM, the heatsink that shipped with the 2600+, one LED red colored fan. I've always wanted a water cooled system myself but I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. I think I would melt something if I did what you tried to do. I think my RAM is decent enough by my cooling sucks.

You can try bumping it up, if the overclock is not stable it should reboot or hang trying to boot into your Linux install. If it does just back down the overclock.

OK thanks huge LondoJowo, I'm going to try this once it cools off here.

One more small question: What specifically should I raise the FSB to? Should I just expiriment and play around? Should I do what you did and go 400mhz? I'll Google around a bit and see what I should do.

playing with the fsb can be a bad idea for stability, but it depends if your ram can handle it. The only ram moduals i know that can be oc'ed are high end corsair, kingston, gail moduals. Also the athlon may not like being oc'ed. But persoanly id start of with increases of 10mhz then lower the increases as your system starts to get ubstable.

In my personal opinion, there is no logical reason to overclock hardware these days. The performance gain will be minimal, and the risk is very high that you will end up just frying something and having to replace some potentially very expensive hardware. My advice: forget it. It's not worth the work. Just my 2 cents. :?