Should I overclock a 2500+

[trkle]

Hi, I have a relatively old computer. It has a Abit NF7, Athlon XP 2500+, 512mb Generic bestbuy ram, 9600 all in wonder, 160gb hdd...
Right now, I am tight on cash, but I bought Quake 4, just to see if I could run it.
Well, I can run it at about 25-30fps on lowest settings at 800x600, but the fps drops down to 10 or less in 3 or 4 person firefights :(
So, I was wondering if I should even bother trying to overclock this, and if I will notice a gain of a few fps. If so, what is a good hsf for my processor?

Thanks

[Nakamori]

The xp 2500 is highly overclockable to 3200 speeds pretty easily, but from personal experience the 9600 (I too had an xp 2500 with sapphire 9600) doesn't keep up with even the xp 2500 so you won't notice a huge improvement in games. your best bet is to overclock the 9600; you should probably get to about 250/400, and add another half gig of ram. That should smooth out your 800x600 performance somewhat noticably.

[trkle]

Ok, thanks for the help! :)

[Kelldor]

Aye, 2500 OC's to 3200 very easily, done it quite alot. Temps will go up though so make sure your cooling is adequate. I see your sig sais you're running PC2700. I've never had an NF7 but in my experience I've never had much luck running any Nforce 2 board with memory dividers set anything other than 1:1. I'd invest in some ram, at least PC3200, before OC'ing your cpu. Good luck.

[kirbyrj]

Your PC2700 RAM probably has at least a little OCing room past DDR333 speed. You might make it all the way to PC3200 (DDR400) speed. It's only a 33mhz jump on the memory. Give it a little more voltage :D.

[gbomb944]

You should always overclock pretty much everything.

[toymachineman19]

You should always overclock pretty much everything.

Correction: You should overclock something only if you have a use for it, sice it does decrease the life of your CPU (even if it isn't noticible). So if you have a reason, go for it! even it is just bragging rights :p