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I'm just curious to know how you guys determine which componant(s) are limiting your overclocks.
When I first decided I wanted to get serious about overclocking, I decided to buy top of the line for CPU, board and cooling. At the time, this was an AthlonXP 1500+, Swiftech MCX462-A, MSI K7T266 Pro2. With some extra case fans, I was able to get a meager OC of 1.42 Gigs @ 142 FSB. I had guessed correctly that the cheap PC2100 I had was the limitation and with better quality memory, I was able to get a higher stable FSB of 146.
4 boards and 6 processors later...
I'm now running a Barton 2500+, Abit NF7-S, 512mb GEIL Ultra Platinum PC3500, Radeon 9800 Pro and waterchilled watercooling using a D-Tec WW and DD Maze4 GPU.
My top stable OC is 2.3 Gigs @ 209 FSB. and 1.75V This is as far as I can get before Prime starts failing, but Memtest runs stable. (Ram running st stock CL2 2-3-3-6)
At this point, I'm not sure if the board is my bottleneck of if it's the CPU. Unfortunately, the CPU is one of the superlocked ones so I can't play with multipliers.
For testing, I use Prime95, Memtest, Sandra, CPU-Z and a couple others I can't think of off hand. From what I can gather, It's either my board or CPU which has reached it's limits. I recently added a Thermalright NB-1C to my northbridge, but it hasn't seemed to effect my OC one way or the other.
What I want to know here, how do you guys determine which componant(s) is(are) holding you back without going through the expensive process of swapping parts based on guesses?
When I first decided I wanted to get serious about overclocking, I decided to buy top of the line for CPU, board and cooling. At the time, this was an AthlonXP 1500+, Swiftech MCX462-A, MSI K7T266 Pro2. With some extra case fans, I was able to get a meager OC of 1.42 Gigs @ 142 FSB. I had guessed correctly that the cheap PC2100 I had was the limitation and with better quality memory, I was able to get a higher stable FSB of 146.
4 boards and 6 processors later...
I'm now running a Barton 2500+, Abit NF7-S, 512mb GEIL Ultra Platinum PC3500, Radeon 9800 Pro and waterchilled watercooling using a D-Tec WW and DD Maze4 GPU.
My top stable OC is 2.3 Gigs @ 209 FSB. and 1.75V This is as far as I can get before Prime starts failing, but Memtest runs stable. (Ram running st stock CL2 2-3-3-6)
At this point, I'm not sure if the board is my bottleneck of if it's the CPU. Unfortunately, the CPU is one of the superlocked ones so I can't play with multipliers.
For testing, I use Prime95, Memtest, Sandra, CPU-Z and a couple others I can't think of off hand. From what I can gather, It's either my board or CPU which has reached it's limits. I recently added a Thermalright NB-1C to my northbridge, but it hasn't seemed to effect my OC one way or the other.
What I want to know here, how do you guys determine which componant(s) is(are) holding you back without going through the expensive process of swapping parts based on guesses?