The Mother Board

[ChicoMarx]

System:
Soltek SL-75KAV KT133A motherboard with ABS II heat shield
AMD Duron 1.0GHz processor
Thermaltake Volcano 7 hsf
512 MB Kingston PC133 SDRAM
Visiontek Geforce 3 video card
....

Questions:
1. How to do it? (BIOS? pencil trick?) Please recommend an article on the 1.0GHz.
2. How fast? With lots of case cooling, how high can you REASONABLY go?

Goals- As fast as possible without:
1. burning the house down
2. destroying the chip in 24 hours
3. destroying the chip in 6 months
4. losing stability in gameplay

Thnx.

[The Disturbance]

I would say to use the pencil trick. Then apply some Arctic Silver 3, go into the BIOS, if you know how to get the voltages, I would try .1 (1.0GHz-1.1GHz-1.2GHz) for the GHz. Since you have a lot of cooling I woould put mine to ummm...1.2GHz at first...if it's going smooth for a while...clock it up to 1.3...and do it all over again... here is a site for the pencil trick...
http://www.motherboards.org/articlesd/how-to-guides/41_1.html

[o1die2]

Check your default cpu vcore setting in the "pc health status" section of the bios. You can try upping the cpu vcore to 1.75 or 1.8, and change the fsb jumper from 100 to 133, if your board has one. If your duron is the newer variety with lasered pits, the pencil trick won't work. It may also help to use jumpers (instead of the bios setting) to set the cpu vcore if your board has them.

[ChicoMarx]

Have done a lot of reading about oc and am not a dummy. Have been putting systems together since before floppies were invented but I've never oced. I just want to check before I try a first OC with my youngest son's machine.

System:
======
1. Mobo - Soltek SL-75KAV KT133A w/ frequency and multiplier dips on board
2. CPU - AMD 1.0GHz Duron
3. HSF - ThermalTake Volcano 7 w/Arctic Silver III grease
4. Memory - 512MB PC133 SDRAM
5. Video - VisionTek GeForce 3 Classic
6. PS - 300W
7. Other - 30GB Maxtor HD, Floppy, CR-ROM, CDRW, etc.
8. Cooling - 92mm front intake, 80mm rear exhaust, 80mm side intake (low over the video card), 80mm side exhaust (high), rear System Blower fan, all rounded cables, Thermaltake Crystal Orb plus ramsinks on the GF3
9. Current Temps - cpu: 34C idle, 40C load / gpu: 42C idle, 44C load / case: 25C - 27C

Are these the next steps?
===================

1. Unlock the Duron with the "pencil trick"

2. Up the fsb and lower the multiplier.
The dips on the mobo let you set the following combinations:
CPU PCI FSB
100 33.3 200 <--- current
103 34.3 206
105 35.0 210
110 36.7 220
112 37.3 224
115 38.3 230
120 40.0 240
124 31.0 244
133 33.3 266 <--- looks like you can set this and have the
140 35.0 280 PCI bus the same as current but this may
150 37.5 300 be too much.

The multiplier dips let you go from 5.5 to 14.0 in 0.5 increments.

3. Adjust the voltage as required. The BIOS lets me do that.

Questions:
========
1. Do you calculate the effective speed as fsb times multiplier?
2. Should I try lower fsb's first and take a chance on the higher PCI speeds or go right to 133?
3. What settings would you start with and then increase?
4. The BIOS contains Redstorm Overclocking. Should I try this? After the unlock?

Suggestions on the next steps would be appreciated. Thnx

[len444]

fsb pci cpu
115 38.3 230

i'd be happy w/ this myself. sandra recommends 36mhz (10%) as max for pci bus- i had an old system run for a year w/ 15%oc of pci bus (nothing special done for heat disipation, though the pc100 mem was more than likely run at 76mhz, so it was never overclocked). you can try for as much as you want- DOC says that you can generally safely overclock a system 10%. the higher you go, the more attention you'll have to pay to heat sinks/ cooling, and case cooling. if your hard core, you can then get into water/ liquid/ peltier/ refridge, ect... cooling of cpu, graphics card, hard drive(s), as well as active cooling of memory (heat spreaders/ heat sinks w/ fan), ect...

as you raise the fsb, the pci bus as well as the agp bus, and memory will run at a higher frequency as well. some of the newer mb's have an async feature in bios to set the ratios of cpu, mem, pci/ agp- i have no experience w/ this- let the knowledgeable give their views w/ this though.

in the above 15%oc, you will raise the agp frequency up as well the agp bus is 66mhz and at 4x = 264mhz

264mhz(15%)=39.6mhz therefore 264+39.6=303.6mhz- not sure if the agp card can do 15% oc w/o active cooling w/hsf?!?

[len444]

tweak/ adjust your bios settings to allow for max performance as well, as this will allow for higher oc.

what os are you using?

if win98, then there is a vcache issuee for memory of 512meg and higher (disregard this w/ win2k or winxp- win 95 needs different settings as well- not applicable- check out bootdisk.com for their explanation of vcache settings!)

http://www.bootdisk.com

512(70%)=358000(k)

system.ini at run from start button

[VCache]
MaxFileCache=358000

copy exactly, save and exit-

use bootdisk.com explanation for reference, as i'm pretty much using their advice here- which is a mod of windows knowledge base articles, which reference win95 mostly.

[ChicoMarx]

XP Pro. If I just change the dips to do this, then it sounds like I don't need to change the multiplier and therefore don't need to unlock the cpu?

[len444]

yes, the 10-15% only implies raising the fsb, w/o touching the multiplier.

unlocking the cpu is good, as you don't get into raising the fsb, which will keep everything cooler (except cpu!)- not sure how much you can raise the multiplier, which will be an experimentation with monitoring temperatures, and stability.

there is a difference between older durons (spitfire?), which are ceramic, and can be unlocked by the pencil trick, and the newer durons (morgan?) that are constructed like the xp cpu's, which need a more involved procedure to unlock -ie. fill laser cuts of l1 bridge w/ super glue, and then clean up bridges, and use some kind of conductive laquer as follows:

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/01q4/011112/index.html

i would seriously consider unlocking the multiplier myself, as the frequency will not have to be raised in order to get the cpu going faster- perhaps raising the fsb as well, would be good for overclocking the video card as well (need for faster frame rates)- you'll have to decide/ experiment and monitor the system just to see what you can safely do before raising the voltage of anything (ie. cpu, memory, agp), then slowly raise voltages if you feel the need for speed- at your own risk of course. there are a lot more experienced people here than myself though regarding overclocking- hope that i've been of some assistance though.

motherboard monitor:

http://mbm.livewiredev.com/

consider adding more case fans- both front and rear of case if possible (increase air flow thus keeping case temps cooler).

[ChicoMarx]

OK. Followed your advice and here are the results with the GF3 oced to 230/520 (200/460 default) and the Vcore to 1.85 from its default of 1.83:

@ 115 38.3 230 - exited from 3DM to the desktop without any error
@ 112 37.3 224 - same result

so I tried 133.3 33.3 266. This clocked up the fsb but left the PCI bus the same as the default 100 33.3 200. The system seems totally stable after 3DM. Had my son run Grand Theft Auto for about 3 hours. CPU temp went from 39C to 44C under load and is now back to 42C. Here's the difference from when I started:

..................Old..........................New..................
Mobo..........100 / 33.3 / 200....133 / 33.3 / 266
VCore.........1.83.......................1.85
CPU............1.0.........................1.33
CPU Temp....39-43....................42-44
Video...........200/460.................230/520
3DMarks.......5158.....................6475

Big question... Is it safe to run the 1G Duron at 133? Case temp is 25C - 28C. Lots of fans.