Hello Right I have a rubbish computer basically and I cant afford a new one! I have a 1.2 Athlon Thunderbird CPU and havent ever tried overclocking it. Is this possible or even worth it? Cheers Josh
Might be. Have a look through your BIOS to see if the options you need are there. If you dont know what your going to adjust then go read the sticky thread in this forum.
My Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 which I used to have could just scrape 1.6 and that was with a decent motherboard and HSF. You could argue that its not worth it, but its fun. As for possible? Well that depends on your board, like fivecheebs said, check in your BIOS and the sticky.
Got my 1.2 ThunderBird at 1333 atm. Had it at 1400 but had random restarts, think I may need more voltage, just havent had chance to fiddle with it Mate has a similar chip and has his at just over 1400 too, forget what exactly.
I had fun when I had my TBird 1333, got 159FSB out of it on my Abit KT7A-RAID with my crucial PC133 cas2.0. I couldn't run any PCI cards other than my 66Mhz IDE controller, the PCI bus was running at nearly 40Mhz
My old Axia 1Gig Tbird would do up to 1.4Ghz... Not too many of the 1's and 1.2's would go past 1.4. You needed to get some pretty hefty cooling (for the time) to get a 1.4 to 1.6 To answer the original question, you need to up the front side bus speed (often goes hand in hand with the memory speed with no way of differentiating them for boards of that era) to overclock the processor assuming you didnt buy an unlocked one or fancy unlocking it yourself. Pretty easy to do - head into the bios and fiddle around.
maybe get a 1.6/1.8ghz duron? there around £25/£30 new, im sure you could get one second hand for about £15/£20.. who knows if you get lucky, you might be able to L2 mod it.. giving you an XP 2000+ (for 1.6ghz).
Mother Board Ok, I think I understand. So I need to check my FSB in the bios. Would I be right or wrong in saying that its 133MHz at the moment as thats what my RAM runs at or is that something different? I had stuck a XP1800 in my machine but it kept freezing. I looked in my mobo handbook and it said it "should" run it fine but when I went onto the QDI website it lookes like I would have to flash my bios to take anything above 1.4GHz (which I am dubious about doing). Would you notice the difference at 1.4GHz from 1.2GHz? and if I changed my FSB would it fry my RAM? Thanks for your replys Josh
IIRC there were 100fsb 1200mhz athlons out. Be unlucky if its one of these, though. Dont be. If the site says it can take an 1800xp after the bios flash and you have one of these lying around gathering dust, then imidiately flash the bios and put the chip in. Not alot. The <10% mhz increase wont result in a systemwide >10% increase which is the magnitude generally required for a noticable gain. If it were done combined with lowering the multiplier (you would need to unlock the chip - lets not go there) and significantly increasing the fsb, then you might start to get to noticable improvements - i.e. >15% increase in real terms output.
