Overclocking Options

All Intel CPUs are currently clock multiplier locked, However you can still adjust the Front Side Bus for now. Intel has yet to come up with a way of locking that up and bringing it to market at a low enough price (which is good for us).

This means that as long as we stick to the Celeron 366s 5.5X clock multiplier setting, we can increase the clock speed by increasing the bus speed of our motherboard. This is where the Abit BX6-2 and BP6 really comes in handy. There are just so many bus settings you can chose from.

I started my testing with the BX6-2 and SlotKET. The SlotKET is needed to to fit the PPGA Celeron into the Slot 1 of the BX6-2. To keep the chip running nice and cool I use an Alpha 7HO cooler supplied to me by 3dfxCOOL (see pic below). These coolers are just plain big! 3dfxCOOL tops them off with Y.S. Tech fans that move over 26CFM of air. They also supplied a tube of heatsink compound. Very nice instead

Twin Towers. Can you say 1210Mhz? :-)

I began with the Celeron from PC Planet. Installation is pretty easy. Insert chip in SlotKET, attach cooler, insert SlotKET in Slot 1. Next I enter the Abit Soft Menu and prepared to take the chip to 550Mhz. Changing the bus to 100Mhz got me a lock up at the windows log on screen. So much for 550Mhz at 2V.

Increasing the voltage to 2.1 and 2.2 didn't do much better. It took 2.3V to get the CPU stable at 550Mhz. The system would run at 103x5.5 for 567Mhz but it's not stable. Prime 95 would get rounding errors within a few minutes and Unreal would kick out to Window within one test loop.

The pre-tested Clerons did a lot better. Both were able to get to 550Mhz at 2V and 567Mhz at 2V. Then I increase the voltage to 2.3 and bus speed to 112Mhz for 616Mhz. Both pre-tested Celerons loaded Windows!! However they were not stable at all. 616Mhz is not really an option with the BX6-2.

Switching to Abit BP6 gave very interesting and exciting results. The untested week 18 Celeron was able to run 567Mhz stable where it wasn't able to in the BX6-2 with SlotKET. I was also able to reduce voltage to 2.2V to make it stable at 550Mhz. I believe some signal quality is lost by the use of the SlotKET, which would explain why the week 18 Celeron 366 can't do 567Mhz on the BX6-2. 567Mhz was the highest the week 18 Celeron would do on the BP6. 

Putting the week 21 Celerons into the BP6 was an eye opener. I figure without the SlotKET in the way these Celeron should really do well, and I was right. Both Celerons were able run on the 110Mhz bus of the BP6 at just 2V! That's 605Mhz! However it wasn't 100% stable. Upping the voltage to 2.2V stabilized the system to where it could run Prime 95 and Unreal test loop 24 hours a day! It's really too bad the BP6 doesn't come with a 112Mhz bus as I think these 2 Celerons would be able to do 616Mhz or more. Both Celerons POST at 682Mhz! WOW!

I was really tempted to load Windows NT on and get some dual 605Mhz Quake 3 action happening but time didn't permit it. I should have dual 605 ready for the next Tech Zone LAN party however. Those guys are in trouble now. :-)

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