Your choice of motherboard will make or break your overclocking effort. To overclock the TBird 1200, I use the new Abit KT7A-RAID. The KT7A-RAID is an update to the excellent KT7-RAID. The two motherboards are the same in almost every way, except the KT7-RAID is based on the KT133 chipset and the KT7A-RAID is based on the newer KT133A chipset.

The KT133A chipset offers a number of improvements over the KT133 chipset. The most important of which is the bus speed settings above 115Mhz actually works! Seeing that I could only get an extra 50Mhz by increasing the multiplier to 12.5X; it was time to fool around with the front side bus settings to see just how much more was left in the CPU.

I must admit that being able to adjust both multiplier and front side bus settings is a lot more flexible than Intel's FSB only adjustments method. My strategy was to run the front side bus as high as possible. The reason for this is because 1200Mhz using 133Mhz X 9 is faster than 1200Mhz using 100Mhz x12. 

Starting with a low multiplier of 5, I bumped the front side bus to 155Mhz! And I got a blank screen. After much fooling around, I found that 145Mhz front side bus is the limit. Now it was time to increase the multiplier. After many blue screens I came up with this.

1,306Mhz. I was hoping for more but I asked the The Over Clockerz Store to send an "off the shelf" CPU and not a pre-tested one. I wanted to see what an average TBird 1200 can do and looks like an extra 105Mhz is it for this unit. Now the Over Clockerz Store does sell pre-tested TBird 1200 which will run at 1420 to 1530Mhz and if I were buying one I would definitely go for one of those instead. You pay a bit more but you're assured of getting a super fast CPU.

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