Well, I've experimented quite a bit over the last few days, and this is what I got so far. First of all, my intent was to push the CPU as far as I could with no unusual cooling methods or voltage increases whatsoever. I regret to say, results were less than impressive based on what I've seen here. That's right, some of us are less fortunate in our results than others, and granted I am still happy with my purchase, it's always a bit frustrating to see others get more out of their chips than I do. Ah, such is life.
- I first booted at default settings and speed to make sure that Windows 2000 would finish updating without problems. Last time I tried to overclock a chip right away, and it wasn't very stable -- which screwed up Windows completely. I had to reinstall it.
- I tried, just out of curiosity, to go straight to 133 MHz FSB at first. I figured it was worth a shot. It booted properly, and I got excited for 10 minutes. Had United Devices running, Winamp, mIRC, a couple of IE windows, and an explorer window. Then came the dreaded blue screen.
- I bumped the speed down to 110 MHz FSB. It ran fine for 12 hours, 4 hours of intense gaming. I went straight to 115 MHz, no problems there either. So I followed with 120 MHz, 125 MHz, and all of that worked fine. I hit 130 MHz. It worked great for a day, but oddly enough, AIM crashed. Don't ask me why Warcraft III and RTCW didn't crash, but AIM did. It was the first time I've seen AIM crash, for the record. Well, thinking it was a random accident, I decided to try my hand at 133 MHz FSB again. But the same thing happened. The computer ran fine for about 10 minutes, then booya: BSOD.
- Out of curiosity, I bumped the voltage .025v, and booted Windows at 133MHz FSB again. It worked fine, except something odd happened: mIRC closed, on two separate occasions, with absolutely no warning. Then the whole lower section (the taskbar and start button area) closed, and restarted. I was a bit worried by those strange events, so I restarted the computer, lowered the FSB to 128 MHz, and the voltage to default 1.5v.
I find it rather frustrating that I can go as far as 130 MHz with (apparently but not definitely) no problems, but 133 is just too much. 48 MHz would be a lot back in the day, but it just seems like a trivial amount for a chip capable of hitting 2 GHz. I guess I have much to learn about overclocking. I might get better cooling methods, but I'm not sure I want to bother. Quite frankly, getting a 452 MHz overclock (it's at 128.27 MHz FSB apparently) is impressive enough for me. Just a little disappointing that it's not the guaranteed 2.1+ GHz overclock that some people make it out to be.
I'm sure I'm not the only one out there so I thought it was only fair to warn those that expect to boot their new P4's at 133MHz FSB out of the box. I certainly do wish that all of you have better luck than I, however. Suggestions are, of course, quite welcome.