j.c.f.'s Athlon Overclock Phase II

Posted: 3/27/2000
Written by: j.c.f.

Nothing in the world of overclocking is ever complete, my overclocks especially. Here then is the continuing saga of my Athlon overclocking.

The Theory.

After the Tech Zone published my first article I got a bunch of feedback, some of it quite useful. Amongst the most often pointed out things were that (a) TECs really were overkill for such a project and that (b) the reason I couldn't push my Athlon 500 past 750 was because the cache was the limiting factor and it's divider needed to be changed.

The Practice.

So some time ago I for reasons I don't quite recall but that may have had a lot to do with boredom, you know, the "OC'd system that's stable enough to be boring needs more tweaking syndrome", I assembled the rig without the TECs and sure enough things still ran. Wanting to add a little science to my madness I went out and bought a Radio Shack Precision Indoor/Outdoor Thermometer so I could get some actual measurements of how effective my various cooling strategies were:

A bit of work with a mill bastard file and it's probe is slim enough to give me a good read of the temperature of the cold plate (or heatsink if I'm not using the TECs). I don't really care about CPU temperature, when using TECs on a CPU that isn't swaddled in insulation the one thing you care about is not letting the temperature of the cold plate drop below ambient room temperature, no condensation please thank you very much.

Of course, being the daft twit I am I bought the thermometer after removing the TECs so I don't have data on how well the old rig was doing. Some days you just burn bridges I guess.  Although having assembled the new system the bolts on the back of the CPU feel much colder than they used to so it's a good bet things are dramatically improved.

Next page: Temperature issues

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