A guide to Athlon overclocking!


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Okay, this guide gets referred to quite a bit...let's see if we can fix or make better a couple things...

3. With the majority of s754 boards especially the ASUS dont have pci/agp locks so you cant go as far as you would like. The DFI s754 boards do i believe. All s939 boards do as far as i know. Set the AGP / pci locks at 33(pci)/66(agp). I have heard that when people have increased there CPU Frequency there agp has auto moved from 66 to a differnt number, so they set it to 67 and it stayed there.

For certain boards, setting the frequency 1 MHz above stock DOES lock it...and ALWAYS lock the PCI/AGP/PCIE frequencies, peripheral cards and controllers don't like being overclocked. ;)

5. In that section there should be a bit called CPU Frequency that is set to 200Mhz. This is what you raise when you want to increase the clock speed of the CPU.

To help clarify, it's been traditionally called the "frontside bus"...just in case it's not called the "cpu frequency" in the BIOS.

6. I recommend raising this by 5Mhz at a time, this is infact about 50Mhz for the actual clock speed (to find out what it is for you times the CPU Frequency by the multiplier of the CPU.

You should probably avoid confusion by just stating that actual clock speed is frontside bus ? multiplier.

7. Exit and save, see if you can get into Windows, if so run a benchmarking program such as 3DMark03/05 or SiSoft Pro 2005. If the computer doesn?t crash or you don?t get any artefacts then you can class it as stable.

Or Prime95....also run memtest after one has found the frequency they like.

8. Keep repeating processes 5-6 untill the computer crashes, you cant get into windows, doesn?t go past post, or games randomly freeze. At this point you can play with the RAM timings and voltages.

and dividers, HTT multipliers, and cooling

To take your CPU further it helps to have RAM with the timings 2-2-2-5 or RAM that can take big voltages.

1. Go to Advanced options again; there should be some options to change your memory settings. If there isn?t any try pressing ctrl + f1.

2. Change the timings to 2.5-3-3-7 at the lowest if you have timings default at 2-2-2-5. If you don?t have 2-2-2-5 or close you may as well stop reading this and go to the next section on upping the voltage

3. When this is changed up the CPU Frequency bit by bit more like in steps 5-6

Okay, actually RAM that's rated for higher frequencies is also VERY helpful (probably more so than just having tight timings and being able to takes lots of volts). Lots of PC4000 RAM actually have very loose timings (3-4-4-8 for example. However, this stuff has been known to top out around 280 MHz, which a lot of PC3200 with 2-2-2-5 timings can't reach. Thus, this renders your second sentence incorrect...

Really the only thing people need to know about timings in overclocking is that the looser they are, the easier it is for one's memory to scale up in MHz (People reading this should know why by this point).

To get the RAM & CPU further it?s sometimes ok to raise the voltage on the chips. For RAM otherwise stated I wouldn?t go over 2.7. I know my OCZ Platinum Rev2 can do 2.8 and it says on the OCZ site it can do 2.9, so check out what other people have been able to do. Also for the Athlon 64s I wouldn?t go over 1.6 / 1.65v, My Clawhammer could do 1.7 on air, but I wouldn?t advise anyone to do that.

RAM voltage depends on the cooling and the chips....Micron's old stuff took voltage very well, but Samsung's TCCD doesn't need lots of voltage to clock high (too much voltage has actually hindered people's overclocks)...for UCCC chips, other people's testing seems to show that you don't need LOTS AND LOTS of voltage to clock well, but UCCC sure likes it's voltage.

To raise the voltage of the CPU is could be called vcore or CPU voltage. It goes up by .025 so 1.4, 1.425, 1.45, 1.475, etc.. Like I said above don?t go over 1.6/1.65 with the A64?s unless you have proper cooling! But even then it can fry your chip.

Since stock voltages keep changing, let's go with what eclipse/ozzimark says:

Max voltage kinda depends on the cooling and cpu. for convenience, here is what i consider the max safe overvolt from stock voltage based on your cooling type:

Stock: +0.1v

Good Air: +.15v to +.2v

Water: +.2v

Phase Change: wtf are you reading this for i:pyou have phase?! :p

...uhm....yes.....anyone have input?

  • 4 months later...
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  • 6 months later...

This has maybe been true.. but this topic is so damn lame... I have never seen worst guide in my life. you speak something about 25-40 degrees and 60 degrees beeing absolute top?? Do you actually realize that there processors still can take 92 degrees before boiling and even later cores like AM2 can take 115 degrees before boiling...

So if someone actually overclocks and hits the tops the temps will surely be in around 60-75 degrees and on stress around 80-85 degrees which would be in modern processors around still cool temps.. I do not know what water cooling you even use to get to 25-30 degrees.. I know I have 4 120mm compo plus an extra fan middle of my ASUS-M2N-Deluxe with AMD Athlon64 X2 board and it still won't ever run below 41-44 Degrees although over clocked a bit, but on idle.

and about HT tech. on AMD boards.. It should always be near 1000Mhz as that is also 16x PCI-E just what I read there dropping it down? yeah right dividing megahertz then should probably also raise as you divide the HT..

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