I am a new Overclocker

[Nathan124]

I am going to get an Athlon XP 1800+ soon and I wanted to ask a few questions. Sorry if they were asked before.

1) If I overclock a processor to its max (FSB, Clock, and Volt's) can it get dammaged? Only if I see what it can do. I wouldn't actually use it at that speed.

2) What would a good tempurature be for a standard heat sink and fan for an AMD K6-2 450 and an Athlon XP 1800+?

3) How do I test it to see if it is stable?

4) Can I overvolt and fry my CPU during the testing.

5) Does the CPU have safe garuds for Overclocking so I don't accidently fry it. Like when It doesn't Post? Or does it die and then tell me - I would hate to fry a new CPU on the first day.

Thanks - Nathan

 

[Spikesoldier]

1: It probably wont even POST, the bottleneck would probably be your RAM or the board itself. Oh, and you'd probably end up toasting your new CPU.
2: Anywhere below 50C. Its been my motto.
3: If it can get into Windows then you're halfway done. Try running something like SiSoft Sandra's Burn-in Wizard.
4: Yes.
5: No. It can't tell you if its dead already. Though, it tells you by that nasty electrical burning smell.

An Athlon XP 1800+ is already too much speed. I would just leave it the way it is, enjoy a few months of great performance, then overclock when you think things are "too slow".

 

[gaidin123]

Yes it's always techinically possible that you will damage your motherboard (or attached card) or processor when you try to overvolt/overclock things. After all, you are trying to pump more voltage and run all sorts of components out of spec. Also overclocking invalidates any warranties you have on your equipment...

With that said the only board/CPU that I've ever killed was my old Abit IT5H motherboard and Pentium 233MMX. It'd run at 75Mhz bus/225Mhz (bus speed overclocking was far more important "back in the day" ) but couldn't run at default speeds after running it overclocked for 3 years or so. But in general you are not likely going to fry anything as long as you keep within the bounds set within the BIOS (ie not modding your motherboard to provide even more voltage to things).

There are tons and tons of ways to test if your overclock is stable and to get reasonable idle/load temps. Personally I overclock, make sure the machine boots, run Quake 3 demo 3+ times, run rc5 with Prime95's torture test, as well as 3dmark 2001. If Prime95 passes the torture test without errors that's a good indication of a stable overclock. The best way to test stability for your uses is to run a newish game that stresses the system. For me right now that's Aliens vs. Predator 2. The game runs fine but once in a while my SBLive card emits are loud beep right before the machine hard crashes...Probably my sound card doesn't like running at 150Mhz bus very much. In day to day activity though, the machine is perfectly stable at those speeds.

As long as you have a good heatsink attached to your CPU you shouldn't be able to fry the CPU at 1.85V (the highest voltage most Athlon mobos allow without extra modding or fiddling with bridges). Leaving your case open and watching the temps is probably a good safety precaution to take.

No. Your CPU has no safeguards against frying itself. If you haven't seen the wonderful Tom's Hardware .avi of them taking the heatsinks off of running Pentium 3, 4s, Athlons, Athlon XPs then you might want to check them out. There have probably been tons of pointless debates about both that video and AMD's response video.

But again, with that said you will be hard pressed to find even a fraction of 1% of Athlon owners that have fried their CPUs because of overvolting to standard BIOS limits.

Good luck! Let us know what you get 'er up to! I think that'll be my next CPU too (overclocked of course ).

Gaidin

 

[Nathan124]

What if I was to Overlock it to it's Max without overclocking the Volts
or
What if I was to Overlock it to it's Max without overclocking the Volts and FSB

Nathan

 

[Spikesoldier]

1. If unlocked, you probably could. But with the Athlon XP's "Lead Canyons" the #2 pencil is harder to use. But ultimately your processor wouldn't likely have the "Juice" or volts to get that high.
2. We all wish it was that easy. But a little .05 V increase wont do any harm. Not likely.