The Mother Board

[Private_Cowboy]

I just built this system,
Kingwin Case
Enermax 450W PSU
Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra
P4 2.4 400FSB
512MB 2700 Samsung ECC Registered
60GB Maxtor 7200
Pioneer A03 DVD Burner
Geforce4 Ti4600

Anyone got any good OC'ing setup ideas (BIOS Etc.) to get good
performance out of this system, oh yeah and I dont have any fancy coolin (yet). Any suggestions would be great

[Tolemac]

For cooling, my current number one recommendations are the Thermaltake Volcano 7+ going for $40.00 or so, or the Swiftech MCX462-U which is $55.00 or so without fan. These are the two best heatsinks in their price ranges for the Socket 478 P4.

On to the overclocking. You can only overclock using the FSB on P4 motherboards, so that, and adjusting the Vcore (CPU core voltage) will be how it's done. The current P4s have a native 100MHz FSB. You will go into the BIOS and adjust the FSB up to achieve an overclock. Start at 105MHz FSB and then reboot and run some benchmark apps such as the free standard version of SiSoft SANDRA and the free versions of both 3DMark 2001SE and PCMark 2002
These will stress the system enough to see if the overclock will hold and not crash the system. Now that you see how easy it is, keep upping the FSB by small increments (3 to 5MHz) each time and do the proceedure over again. Once you come to a FSB setting where the system is unstable, back it off a couple of MHz and then adjust the Vcore up one notch, going from 1.5v to 1.525v or 1.55v and then try it again. If it is stable again, go up one MHz on the FSB until it is unstable and up the Vcore to 1.6v or 1.625v. You can keep doing this till you hit 1.7
These voltages that I'm quoting are for P4's with the Northbridge core. Here's the link to the core voltages of all of the P4's just in case you have a different one. http://www.intel.com/support/processors/pentium4/voltreq.htm

Basically, don't go above the default core voltage by more than 0.20 or 0.25 to be safe.

Once you have a good overclock going and it is running stable for more than a couple of days, you can then start adjusting the memory in the BIOS to see what kind of timing setting will give you the best performance. Start with the defaults, and move up the timings one notch at a time on one setting at a time and reboot the system and test it out. Keep going as before and when it becomes unstable, back it off one notch and go to the next setting. If you end up setting it to the max on one of them, don't worry about it as long as it works. Each board and stick of memory is different so you may be able to max out one, but not another.

The main thing is to take your time and go slow! Patients here will most definitely be rewarded.
_________________
The Gift of Healing

[Private_Cowboy]

Thanks for the help, I'll try that and let you know how it goes...