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My Overclocking / Cooling Experience
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This page recounts my overclocking experience with a PC I built (as described here) in January 2001. Since I encountered many problems, many of which I found brief discussions of here and there in forums and newsgroups, but I could nowhere find any sort of nitty-gritty step-by-step discussion, I thought this might be useful. People who know this stuff will no doubt say on occasion "What a freaking idiot! He's lucky it didn't blow up!" and they will be right: I'm not trying to demonstrate how intelligently I approached this, I'm just trying to describe what I did so that perhaps someone else will be able to avoid some of my screwups....
For those who like to know in advance how the story turns out, I ended up getting a 20% performance increase, with my 1GHz Athlon TBird running stably at 1.2GHz. In the course of the overclocking I engaged in some efforts to enhance my system's cooling, with a few mis-steps but substantial success. Oh, and all of the benchmarks/results reported here are with the following programs running in the background: Win98 Task Scheduler Norton Anti-Virus v.5.0 Auto-Protect or InnoculateIT SyGate Manager MBM5 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Index:
Monitoring, benchmarking, & stressing software Resources The System Overclocking Results I: Bad! Overclocking Results II: Worse! Overclocking Results III: Good! Tweaking the Cooling |
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Monitoring, Benchmarking, & Stressing: To keep apprised of how your CPU is doing, you need to monitor the temperature, at least -- I quickly came to like Motherboard Monitor and continue to use it. To be able to compare your PC's performance with what it was before you changed anything, and also compare it with figures given by others out there, you need common benchmarking software. The most common benchmarking software seems to be SiSoft Sandra, 3DMark2000, and Quake III Arena. To test how hot the CPU gets at the new settings, you need to "stress-test" it with programs that really pound on it relentlessly. For this, the most popular are Sandra, again (the Burn-In Test set up to cycle continuously between the two different CPU tests), and Prime95 (either regular or the Torture Test) -- to max out the temperature quickly I prefer to run both simultaneously.... |
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Resources: |
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I looked in lots of places, and I found the best approach for overclocking an Athlon is to read Harry's FAQ, then browse and search these three forums and one newsgroup for answers to specific questions:
Icrontic Overclocking Forum Overclockers.com AMD CPU Forum Amdmb.com Overclocking Forum alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd However, I emphasize that my screw-ups were my fault only, and not the result of any information I gleaned from any of these places -- and indeed it was posts there that saved me.... |
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The System:
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From what I've been able to piece together, only the CPU and motherboard really matter re overclocking -- though having solid-as-granite memory such as Crucial's helps one to recognize that the "HIMEM.SYS has detected unreliable XMS memory..." message (see below!) just means that something is awry with one's BIOS settings and not with the memory.... I gather that cranking the FSB way up can screw up other components, too, but I didn't experience any of that. |
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Overclocking Results I: Bad! I started out making a nearly-fatal mistake. I had not checked my CPU temperature after building my PC, and I didn't look anywhere to see what to expect. When I first installed the CPU, I had chickened out installing the Chrome Orb I had purchased, because the retainer spring seemed incredibly stiff and I feared breaking the chip. I had also purchased a copper shim, but decided to just get the thing running and postpone anything fancy. So I had installed the OEM heatsink/fan that came with the TBird, without the shim. But now that I was going to try overclocking, I decided to get serious and go ahead and install that Chrome Orb ... and the shim. [DO NOT DO THIS!] I did so, with some Radio Shack thermal grease (which is in no way responsible for what happened!), after endeavoring to paint the L1 bridges back together with some of that window-defroster repair paint. (This is a variation on The Pencil Trick -- I found this exceedingly difficult, because of the very small scale and the paint's propensity to dry rapidly -- but I ended up with something that looked good.) I booted it up, and installed Motherboard Monitor 5, because I liked the fact that it will provide a running log of its sensor readings, which the VIA software that came with the KT7 will not. So, I ran some benchmarks and noted the high/low temperatures. Since I hadn't bothered to find out what sort of range the temperatures should be in, I did not yet get as hysterical as was warranted.... With my baseline established, I then tried some overclocking, with the results described in the table -- the temperatures did not vary appreciably between BIOS resettings (which in restrospect isn't surprising since everything was so overheated to begin with): |
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Overclocking Results II: Worse! I was no longer confident about anything, but I had the most doubt about my painting job to join the L1 bridges. So, I pulled the heatsink/fan and the CPU out, and cleaned off the paint. NOTE re cleaning stuff off of the CPU and the bottom of the heatsink: for me, neither alcohol nor paint thinner worked well at all, but fingernail polish remover based on ethyl-acetate did the trick -- particularly regarding cleaning off the window-defroster-repair paint and the thermal-foamy stuff that comes on most heatsinks.This time I did the straight pencil trick, with my 3mm mechanical pencil (HB Pentel lead), magnifying light, and the edge of a strip of plastic. I found it to be very easy to get good dark connections without any stray marks. Unfortunately, I then put the Chrome Orb back on with the copper shim.... |
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Overclocking Results III: Good! At this point, while perusing the forums for insights about my problems, I read a post about temperatures ... and then read a few more, especially re the Chrome Orb and shims ... AND THEN IMMEDIATELY SHUT DOWN MY PC!  It turns out that the slight raised ring on the bottom of the Orb causes it to simply not touch the CPU if you use a shim. There are some who seem to conclude from this that shims are bad, but I cannot agree. Shims work well to reduce the likelihood of breaking the CPU by applying uneven pressure when affixing the heatsink/fan. As long as the heatsink surface is FLAT, that is ... and as far as I have read, this EVIL heatsink is the only one with this designed-in flaw....
So, I yanked the Orb out of there, cleaned off the thermal goop (staying clear of "cleaning" my careful L1 pencilings), and reinstalled the OEM heatsink/fan that came with the TBird. Fired it up, and, Whew! |
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 Pushing the 1GHz@1.2GHz TBird with the Sandra dual-CPU-tests-cycling and the Prime95 Torture Test simultaneously gave this result (the MBM5 Dashboard in in the center): (I obviously like the new MBM5 feature that allows you to choose the fonts in the Dashboard....) |
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