Your Overclocking 'Toolbox'?

Lucutus

Hey All,

I am about to enter my first round of overclocking, I've ordered a new mobo (Asus P4S533), New Chip (Intel P4 1.6ghz), and 512 megs of Samsung DDR PC2700.

Knowing little about overclocking, I was wondering what 'tools' people here use for overclocking systems.

I'm talking about software and hardware here, heat sensors, old toilet roll inserts, everything. And what you use them for!

Post up here what you use for overclocking, why you use it, and links to resources and sources if you can.

If this thread goes well, we can make it a sticky and it can be a resource for other beginners etc.

Lucutus

koneko

For o/c'ing a P4 you won't need many supplies (till you get into the whole pin/cable wrapping thang). Overclock the FSB, mess about with the BIOS basically.

Peats have lots of nice little things. It's always good to have a solder and pliers lying about. I'll dig up my OC'ing shops links for ya later, that sell lots of nice little things.

Overclock your ram get some nice cooly things from http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Other_CPU_and_System_Coolers_18.html#asy_2d000_2dtt
made my ThermalTake, they come in orange (for the active cooling one) and blue (ooh!)

If you can, get watercooling. If you want to overclock and tinker a lot it's the best. It'll also make your case-mod look sweet. You don't even need expensive parts, just make them up as you go along (PetStop sell pumps you can use for instance).

Gerry

Ok, I will post more on this later, but heres a small start.

First of all, in terms of actual hardware equipment, nothing special.

A selection of screwdrivers, make sure you have a good screwdriver of the correct size for removing the clip on your heatsink.
A kvm (keyboard video mouse) switch box would be handy.
A good bit of wire, of the standard thickness you would see in one of the power cables coming from your psu.
Wire strippers
Insulating/Electrical tape
A good clear workbench is helpful
A spare video card, and a spare stick of ram

Theres loads more, I'll think of it later.

Software:

A backup of your windows partition ( a cloned image or whatever)
Don't use win98/me of course. Win2k will refuse to boot if your processor is highly unstable, giving you an early warning.
Some intensive games, I favour using quake3 and 3dmark 2001

Cpu stress test programs:

Any of the distributed computing projects like seti, ud agent or prime95 are good for a start.
However, I have found programs which will crash a machine with the slightest hint of instability inside half an hour (usually within 5 minutes). These same machines would run for 24 hours or more with any other stress test.

These top notch stress tests are: (use google for now, I'll put up links later)

burnbx ( stresses cpu and chipset, and works on any chipset)
burnp6 ( stresses cpu )
burnk7 ( stresses athlon cpu)

I think the first thing to do when overclocking is to establish whether your cpu can take the increased speed, and worry about other components later. So eliminate them for now.

If you are raising the fsb significantly, I would remove all non essential cards, leaving just the graphics card.

Also disconnect your cdrom drives, they can be sensitive to increased pci speeds.

Set your ram timings to the slowest preset in the bios.

Crank up the fsb or multiplier or whatever, and if the machine makes it into windows, start running some stress tests.

If it does not boot at all, power off, and disconnect from the supply before trying to power on again. (Or if your psu has a switch on the back, that will do also). Many motherboards will reset the cpu speed to a lower speed if you hold down a button like insert or home when powering up. Consult the manual for this. If this does not work, or you do not have this feature, disconnect the machine from the mains, and clear the cmos ( move the jumper to the other position for a few seconds ).

Once you have the machine up and running for a while with the cpu and motherboard stress tests, you will want to see if the rest of the machine can handle the increased speed (because usually you will have increased the fsb) Increasing the fsb is the best way of increasing performance anyway.
So start running tests with games, use a looping timedemo in quake3, then try looping 3dmark 2001.
Leave these on overnight if possible, to test a new overclocked speed.

Add back in the rest of your components gradually. At the highest speed you can now start tweaking your memory settings in the bios.

Have to go back to work..