Project 527

Overclocking 101

Disclaimer- I cannot be held responsible for any damage resulting from the use of any information presented here. Any overclocking is done at your own risk!! In other words, you blow it up, your problem! :-)

Overclocking is the "art" of running your CPU faster than the speed is was sold to you at. All CPU makers put a safety "margin" in their chips. When Intel sells a 233 chip they have to make sure it can run at that speed in almost all conditions you can imagine so they're conservative when they rate a chip. A 233 chip may in fact be able to run at 300Mhz because of this margin.

As processor manufacturing becomes more advanced, the CPU's that are sold to you are deliberately "Clock Locked" to stop you from running it at higher speeds. Intel's current manufacturing "yield" is so good that almost all of their .25 micron CPU coming off the line can run at 450Mhz!

Because of this, Intel decided to put locks on all their chips, making it much harder to overclock them. P2-233 can only run at 3.5x, P2-266 can only run at 4x, P2-300 can only run at 4.5x, and PII-333 can only run at 5x. You can not go higher or lower than these multipliers. So how do you overclock locked Intel chips?

Overclocking a PII-300 to 527Mhz

Before we begin, I've have to mention once again that only certain S-Spec PII-300 can make it to 527Mhz. There is NO WAY a normal .35 micron PII-300 will go that high. You'll be lucky if you hit 350Mhz. The S-Spec to look for are SL2W6, SL2W7, SL2W8, SL2YK, SL2VY, and SL35V.

It's very easy to overclock the above S-Spec PII-300 since they are really PII-450 that's been remarked as PII-300. Both PII-300 and PII-450 are locked at 4.5x. The difference is that the PII-450 is meant to be used with a 100Mhz bus (100x4.5=450Mhz) while the PII-300 is meant to be used with a 66Mhz bus (66x4.5=300Mhz).

All you do is hit the Delete key when your comp is booting up to enter the Abit motherboard's BIOS. From there go to the CPU Softmenu and change the External Clock to 100Mhz. Hit Esc then F10 to save and exist.

BOOM! You got yourself a PII-450! Change the External Clock to 117Mhz and you got yourself a PII-527! :-) When going to 527Mhz, you may have to increase the Core Voltage a bit. I'm running it at 2.1 volts. I would not recommend going higher than 2.2 volts. Just go high enough for a stable system. Start at the default voltage then go up one step at a time until your system is stable, but DO NOT go above 2.2 volts. If your system is still unstable at 2.2 volts, then 527Mhz was not meant to be. Survey shows that about 40% of these S-Spec PII-300 can hit 504Mhz (I don't know how many can do 527Mhz). You just wasn't lucky enough to get one that can do it.

Overclocking the Viper 550 TNT

The easiest way to overclock the TNT card is by using PowerStrip. Click here to download it. The only bad thing about PowerStrip is that you have to set the clock speed each time you start Windows, unless you register your copy.

To get to the overclocking menu below, click the icon that PowerStrip installs on your system bar and chose "Advanced Options". From Advanced Options chose "About the PowerStrip" then "Performance". The menu below will appear for you to set the TNT's core speed and memory speed.

Just because it allows you to set speeds up to 133Mhz doesn't mean you should do it. Don't go crazy here. :-)

Depending on the type of cooling you are doing you should be able to clock the TNT up to 115Mhz core and 120Mhz memory (with the TennMax Lasagna TNT Cooler). Fool around with it till you get a stable system.

Let's See Some Screen Shots