Seemingly unusual overclocking circumstances...

[Prajch]

After owning this computer for about a year and a half, I decided to overclock the processor. Before I go on, here are my system specs:

Abit IC7 w/ Zalman silent northbridge heatsink
Intel Pentium 4 2.4C w/ Zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu
Kingston ValueRAM (C3) DDR400 - 2 x 512mb (dual channel mode)
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro @ 490MHz CPU, 342MHz RAM w/ Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer
Western Digital 7200rpm 80gig w/ 8mb cache
Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS w/ MIDI adapter
Enermax low-noise 350W PSU
Enermax case with 1 side intake fan, 1 rear exhaust fan, 1 top exhaust fan

I think that covers it.

Anyway, I decided to go ahead and begin raising the FSB at a 1:1 ratio, to see if my ValueRAM would overclock at all, fully expecting to eventually need a 5:4 divider. To my surprise, it got to 210 with ease. Then 220. 230. 240. Finally, with a small voltage boost to the RAM, I managed to raise my FSB to 250, without a hint of instability. This is, of course, with very lax timings (3-4-4-8) and Game Accelerator on Auto mode. What I'm left with is a 2.4C running at 3GHz, and crappy PC3200 ValueRAM running at 250MHz. I'm not sure how rare this is, but if you don't believe me, refer to these images.

http://img25.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img25&image=cpu.jpg
http://img80.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img80&image=ram2.jpg
http://img80.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img80&image=ram.jpg

The Vcore hasn't been changed from its default 1.525 V, and the RAM is at 2.8 V. If I lower the RAM voltage, things start getting a little ugly (random reboots, etc). If I raise the FSB a bit more, the system becomes extremely unstable. If I activate Game Accelerator on Turbo mode, the system won't even boot much further than the initial post screen. I'm assuming this means that I've hit my RAM's ceiling, and would have to switch to 5:4 to continue, but I haven't tried that as of yet.

My real concern is that of temperatures. My system idles at an average of 48C, depending on whether or not my air conditioner is on, and maxes out at 67C under full load. These temperatures are actually not much worse than my original ones; they may be a few degrees higher, if that! Given my airflow and heatsink, this seems much too high, and so I was wondering if this might have anything to do with the Zalman thermal paste being used. Would I see a dramatic difference in temperatures if I used something along the lines of Arctic Silver? Could it be terrible cable management (this I doubt)? What else could potentially be causing this insanely high load temperature? I know I've seen many instances of people getting 40C when idle and 45C under load, so there must be something amiss.

Any comments/suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[ryuji]

arctic silver makes up to a 10 deg C difference in temperature... other thing is i bet your mobo reads temps hot
on the topic of memory... at 2.80 volts my pc2700 memory runs at 2.5-3-3-8 well past 200 mhtz... i havent had a system that could go past 200 but me friend tried it at stock voltage at like 220 or 240 mhtz with stock voltage, feeding it 2.80 volts lets me run it at 2-3-3-8 at 2700 stable to the wall of my cpu, wich is 180 mhtz, i got corsair valueselect memory... i either lucked out or memory can run beyond spec quite easly

 

[ryuji]

oh yea... fsb overclocking for the most part makes no difference in temperature... its vcore that makes a difference

and with memory, i would love to see if i could do 2-2-2-6 but im too scared to go past 2.80 volts

 

[Prajch]

Alright, I cleaned the old stuff off, applied some Antec Silver using the "rice grain" method, and reinstalled the heatsink. At idle, I'm getting about 1-2 degrees lower, and at load, around 6-7, so I'm pretty satisfied. I also ripped off the fan hole covers machined into my case with a set of wire cutters; took a while, but it got my case a few extra degrees cooler.

Thanks for the push in the right direction.