Undervolting a Northwood

Hi

I have a Pentium 4 2.6 Northwood that I wanted to convert to a media server. I want it to run as quietly as possible, so I was thinking of trying to undervolt the processor to reduce the heat.

Has anyone tried this? Is it even possible?

It's possible, but the decrease will be nominal before you start running into problems. You'll have better luck reducing noise with a high-end passive cooler on the chip (e.g. fanless Ninja w/ 120mm Nexus rear exhaust fan) rather than trying to undervolt it and using a lesser cooler.

Agree'd I don't think you'll be able to bring the voltage down much without underclocking.

Lowering the voltage would likely raise the current draw, this could be damaging to the cpu and other components. Just like raising the voltage increases the stability when overlocking, lowering the voltage would decrease stability.

And by damage I mean that it would most likely only shorten the life and not be something immediately noticeable.

Leaving stock voltage and underclocking the front side bus would be your best way to redruce power. A media pc would work fine even if it was only running at 2ghz, or 1.8 or something.

Get a good cooler for that 2.6c. I have the rig in my sig and its near dead silent. Northwood chips run cool at stock speeds already. No need to undervolt. Just get a high end cooler with low rpms (fan speed controler) and you will be surprised how much quieter your system will be.

1st does your motherboard even let you undervolt. Thats the biggest question.

I have my 2.4C undervolted at 3.2Ghz in my Shuttle XPC, so I think you should be able to undervolt it at stock no problem. And if you have a good overclocker like mine, you might be able to do it at 3Ghz with reasonable sound/heat.

That same 2.4C also did 3.45Ghz at stock voltage and only needed a little bump to get to 3.6Ghz (stable for ANYTHING but Prime95)

chrisf6969 said:

That same 2.4C also did 3.45Ghz at stock voltage and only needed a little bump to get to 3.6Ghz (stable for ANYTHING but Prime95)

Click to expand...

Chris, that 3.45GHz/288MHz FSB is phenomenal at stock voltage. Will most 2.4's do that, or did you just get lucky?

My 3.0C will handle only ~240MHz before I have to start cranking the voltage. 1.6V is enough to get it completely stable at 3.825GHz, and I don't want to run any higher with the low noise air cooling (Zalman CNPS9500) I'm using.

2.4C's seem to have been some of the best overclockers.

my theory about how the lowest speed bins are usually the best:

I think the 2.6 & 2.8's were chips that failed at the 3.0 & 3.2 speed bins, while the 2.4C's (or other lowest speed bins) might have just been bulked produced (not binned down from higher speed bins) B/c they seem to hit higher clocks very easily.

examples I've had direct experience with: 1.6a that did 2.4Ghz 50% OC, 2.4C that did 3.6Ghz 50% OC, 920D that I've tested at 4Ghz so far, but might also reach a 50% OC with some extra voltage.

Good northwoods can hit 3.6Ghz on default voltage. But usually not much more.

I got lucky that it did so well, but it seems as the luck with 2.4's was much higher than with 2.6C's (or 2.8C's)

Thanks for the info. I got a Zalman 7000-alcu, but I will need to wait untill I get a new case to see if it helps.