HDD Killers

Hello there boys and girls, today’s post will be about raping the shit out of PC hardware overclocking. Yesterday I decided that my PC could run that bit faster and decided to have another go at it, of course, we all know how well it went last time don’t we…

Well this time it went somewhat better. At stock settings my CPU is 11×200 = 2200 MHz, I put the multiplier down to 8 and started uppping the FSB, I got it to 8×250, it was very unstable at 8×260. In fact when it tried to load Windows, it just didn’t, nothing happened, just a blank screen. So I decided to reset it to the default settings and just check that everything was OK, but it wasn’t, I got the same black screen again. I put the XP SP2 CD in a booted into the recovery console, fixboot and chkdsk, then I tried again. This time I got some error about a missing DLL. Fuck. So I restored a ghost image onto the HDD that I had had the foresight to create when I first set my PC up. Then I went to bed.

Today I decided to have another go. I took my CPU back to 8×250 and it booted up OK and seemed fairly stable while I was pissing about in Windows, especailly when you consider that I run UD which means my CPU is constantly at 100%. It wasn’t until I ran a benchmark (3DMark05) and it crashed just seconds in, that I realised it might not be as stable as I previously thought. It kept crashing until the FSB was down to 230, grr.

So I started upping the multiplier, up to 10×230 it seemed perfectly fine. I set the multiplier to 11 (which is it’s stock setting), the motherboard POSTed and then Windows just didn’t load again, WTF??? 11 is the stock setting, the temps are fine, I know it’s only air-cooled but 45 C at idle more than acceptable. So I upped the Vcore a bit, from 1.650 to 1.700, that got it to boot up into Windows (luckily nothing got fudged up on my HDD it seems this time). Upon running the benchmark though it crashed again, I totally don’t understand why. 11×220 seems fairly OK though, however it’s only an overclock of 220MHz.

So now I decided to set the FSB back to 200 and see how high I could get the multiplier. 12×200 with a Vcore of 1.800 seems fairly rock solid, however for some reason there is no option for a multiplier of 12.5, so I decided to jump straight to 13. No matter what the Vcore, it’s just completely unstable at 13×200, I tried every value from 1.800 to 2.000 and it just wouldn’t have it, might I also add that with a Vcore of 2.000, the temps were getting fairly mental, the highest I saw was 57 C (135 F) at idle. To put that into context, my CPU is currently 49 C (120 F) under full load.

So then I tried 12×220, the highest stable multiplier and bus speed, 2640 MHz clock speed. Sometimes I just don’t understand computers, as far as I know they should just work perfectly together, it would appear that is not the case, no matter what the Vcore. It’s not really worth it for a mere 440MHz anyway, so I may aswell leave my PC as it is. Perhaps if I had some better cooling than this it would be possible to achieve higher clock speeds while remaining stable, but it’s not really worth spending any big money on it, it’s a 32bit CPU and an AGP motherboard, the way I see it they’re pretty much dead technologies anyway.

Oh, and if anyone is wondering why I never bothered to tweak the DDR Voltage, it’s because I don’t need to. I have DDR 533 PC4200 RAM, but since at the maximum my FSB only got to 260MHz, the RAM would be running at DDR 520, so was never even taxed and therefore the DDR voltage never needed to be altered. Having said that I did set it to 2.7V (as opposed to the default value of 2.6V) throughout, just to be on the safe side.