Overclocking the P4 For not

Overclocking the P4 For not-so-dummies

by Farhan Mohamed Ali

Page 1
Intro

Page 2
Factors affecting overclock & Stability Testing

Page 3
Changing BIOS settings & overclocking

Page 4
Updates and Final Words

UPDATES

Update - Jan 26, 2004 - Spread Spectrum Modulated
Most people (but not all) report greater stability and higher overclocks when disabling the Spread Spectrum Modulated feature which is located in the Advanced BIOS Features in ABIT mainboards. Other manufacturers' BIOSes may be slightly different. Play around with this setting and see if enabled or disabled gives you better stability.

Update - Jan 26, 2004 - ASUS P4 mainboards
When overclocking and running stress tests including Prime95 on an Asus 875/865 chipset, turn off USB legacy support. Enabling it seems to cause some instability problems for some people. Also, some people have reported that turning off ACPI 2.0 support in the BIOS also helps stability. As always, try it out and see if it helps.

Update - Jan 26, 2004 - ABIT P4 mainboards
I do not know if this affects all ABIT boards, but I do notice that my IS7-E is a little more stable if I change the Halt On setting to No Errors. This option is located under the Standard CMOS Features menu in the BIOS.

Update - Jan 26, 2004 - CPUs Overclocking well on default voltage but not responding to voltage increase
There ARE some CPUs that overclock really well on default voltage but suddenly hit their limit, even increasing the core voltage will not help overclocking. Thanks to aleck for bringing this to my attn.

Update - Jan 28, 2004 - PRIME95 stability testing settings added at the bottom of page 2
Thanks to lorryman, bwan, and shady86 for reminding me.

Update - Jan 30, 2004 - PRIME95 stability testing settings error corrected
HUGE thanks to leadaxer for finding an enormous error in my Prime95 guide. It has been corrected.

Update - Feb 5, 2004 - Added some settings for ASUS mainboard users
Thanks to B-Hong for pointing out some differences in settings on ASUS boards in the FSB:RAM ratio settings.

FINAL WORDS

I hope that the article was helpful to some people. It was written completely based on my own experience in overclocking. For a follow up article on how to tweak your RAM, go here.

I hope there will not be any people ripping off my work and claiming it as their own.

As this is the 1st long article I have ever written, I realize that it might not be perfect. For any suggestions/questions, please email me at ikanayam@hotmail.com or leave a comment in my thread. If your suggestion is really good, I will be sure to include some acknowledgement.

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