..
I'm not sure at what point the 1/4 divider kicks in, I know the 1/3 divider
kicks in at 90. I'm also not sure of the AGP divider, Spajky did tell me
that at 133 the AGP is running at 89Mhz so I guess it's running at spec at
100.
I"d make a backup of the HDD and give it a go... if the PCI bus is out
of spec you'd probably see HDD problems, then perhaps USB and NIC.
It's true that the AGP bus would be at 89MHz, but IMHO, that's
actually a good thing IF the video card tolerates it, since at 2X mode
it's a bit bottlenecked for newer video cards. I believe Spajky has
on his website a few methods to attempt overcoming the AGP bus speed
issue. In my own experience one of the most significant details is to
disable sideband addressing, as it seem to cause problems at the
higher FSB speeds. Sometimes the BIOS will allow disabling it, but
other times it's necessary to mod the video card bios, if you're
fortunate enough to be using a card supported by the needed bios
utilities (especially nVidia Geforce and latter).
The AGP bus would indeed be in spec again at 100MHz FSB. There were
early BX boards that would sync the AGP bus to the FSB when CPUs like
a Celeron < 800MHz was o'c, since it'd have default 66MHz FSB. This
"issue" was largely nonexistant with latter BX boards, or at least
there was a setting to choose.
At the moment, with the Mendicino cellies the voltage is set to auto on the
slockets and I have the option in the BIOS of Auto, 2.0, 2.05, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
and 2.4 volts vcore.
Then I'd expect you'll have a +.4V range over the default of whichever
CPU you install, OR over the voltage set by the slotket.
I'm right in thinking the coppermines are 1.75v default?
I "think" around the time that Intel released those faulty PIII
1.13GHz chips, at that point the PIII at 1.0-1.13 used 1.75V, but
otherwise they all used lower voltage. Celery in the cA0 and cB0 used
1.5V, then moved up in voltage to 1.7V at the end. So you can
basically tell the stepping just by checking the voltage on the label.
If it's a 1.5V chip it'll probably not o'c much past 900MHz even if
you do increase the voltage except in rare cases.
I'm not sure how to tell what stepping the CPU is. I don't have these CPUs
in my hand yet, they're in the post. Is there a number I can look up on them
when I get them? Or do I just fit them and use something like Aida32?
Intel has a Celeron datasheet with a table, or to get a rough idea
just note the voltage as mentioned above.
I don't want to go for extreme overclocks on these, I'd just like to get a
little more out of them without sacrificing stability.
1.2Ghz is "usually" about the upper limit, it might not be 100% stable
at that speed... some are, others aren't.
Also I'm on a tight
budget so extreme cooling doesn't come into the equation either.
Well, extreme is relative... these days even the worse Athlon 'sinks
are plenty good enough for a Coppermine, even o'c and overvolted.
Whatever you have handy that's post-Pentium 1 is probably good enough
unless you exceed 1.8V or have poor chassis airflow. The main issue
is the same as always, how much fan noise you can stand. I've used
$1 K6 heatsinks on ~1GHz celerons in SFF systems, they mainly had a
nice thick Al base which compensated for their overall smaller size.
As well, I
don't want to endanger my peripherals by having really out-of-spec busses. I
already had a HDD fail on one of these boards from running the PCI bus at
41.5Mhz (83FSB) although it could have been that the drive just wasn't very
robust. I don't want to risk damaging the craphics cards especially, they're
both running GeForce 2 MX400/64Mb cards which, although they are old tech, I
can't afford to replace.
Well, we both know that to a certain extent you're always choosing to
risk hardware when overclocking... Within margins the hardware is
designed to support, like running the Celery 600 @ 900, is pretty
safe, but with the Celery 900 you're either: A) Pulling a lot of
power though a motherboard that was never intended to run 1.2GHz
CPUs... it may work fine, or might have decreased lifespan. B)
Running at somewhat lower and having out-of-spec PCI bus. If the
board supports 124MHz FSB with 1/4 PCI divider then that "might" be an
ideal setting. The cC0 and later Celerons needed little to no voltage
increase for ~1.0GHz, but the voltage needed starts to climb after
that. This seemed to be the trend, but it can hardly be applied to a
single specimen of CPU.
I guess trying for 100FSB with both of them may be OK. The PCI and AGP
busses will be running to spec and it's a reasonable overclock. (I've just
Xposted this to a.c.h.o, I may get some more feedback by having it there as
well). I'll be running the standard HSFs on them, although I do have a bit
of AS3 I'll use.
I wouldn't even use the AS3 if you have generic compound avaiable.
After you've ran an Athlon you become a lot more comfortable with 45C
temps from a Coppermine, it's really not hard at all to keep them
cool enough.
Thanks for your input Dave, anything else you (or anyone else) think(s) may
be relevant would be appreciated.
Cheers,
I expect the MSI Master slotket will work great, but is the older one
even Coppermine-compatible? It could be, I just don't remember.
Dave
