I just raised my fsb to 152 on my 1600xp. I also slightly increased the voltage to 1.75v. However my idle temp has only increased by 2 degrees celsius from 35 to 37. Is this a normal, above normal or below normal temp increase? How can I possibly tell if it is giving me false readings? I'm using a stock amd HSF but it seems to be working great, if these temps are right. I also have great case airflow so that obviously helps. Basically I'm new to the OC scene. Any tips, tricks, and advice would be great! I especially need help with ram, and ram timings! I am lost when it comes to OCing ram. THANKS!
first, if your ram is generic, don't paly with timmings cause it won't handle it. OC'ing the ram is to lower the timmings... and high up the ram voltage. You have to have good quality ram with heatspreaders else it won't work... as for your fsb, your lucky I coun't get over 139 with my 1700+ on a 266fsb board... I had pc100 ram too but still your readings are right... it doesn't heat up the cpu that much... it's the voltage that heats up the cpu. and 1.75 is too much... I have 1.7 and I've OC the cpu and fsb... I guess that you only OC your fsb... OC the fsb deals more with ram than anything else... sure the cpu need a little boost but not that much (1.65 is the default I think...) you can unlock the multipliers by sorting 2 pins of the cpu with a thin wire in the socket but I don,t remember which and haven,t tried it.... Unlocking your multipliers will let you have a way better OC. anyway, hope it helps
I don't know what brand my ram is... I've pulled it and can't find any name brand markings... However I've seen a lot of people here changing their ram timing to 2-2-2-5. I changed mine to that and it appears to be running stable. what exactly does this mean though? I don't know what CAS latency and that kind of stuff is. Is it bad to run it at 2-2-2-5 if it theoretically shouldn't be able to? Or is it just a matter of it working or not?
the CAS latency is the timming.. like 2-2-2-5. If your ram stands those agressive timings it's because your ram is good. if you take corsair XMS for example... those ram sticks are garanteed to run at 2-2-2-5... they were made for that to run at those timming stock so... but if you ram is stable (stress it with sandra to be sure) then good for you and don't touch it
Depends on the ram, for Corsair XMS/Kingston HyperX/Twinmos and some others no it wont be a problem. And you dont need heatspreaders to get good timming from your ram. In most cases heatspreaders are pure cosmetic, they dont really provide that much cooling difference. And I wouldnt overclock with a stock AMD heatsink/fan. Those temp readings could be off, a true way to tell the correct readings is to get a temp probe.
yeah it still seems to be running stable. When I turned the system off I immediately felt the cpu heatsink and the ram and both felt just a little over room temp. Is this a reasonable way to determine the approximate temp? I mean, if the cpu was getting too hot for safety, the HS should be hot. Am I wrong?
At the overclocks you're trying it's pretty unlikely that your going to fry anything immediately.... you'll know when you've hit a wall when o/c'ing any individual component as system stability will be compromised (that's why it's best to just adjust one thing at a time so you can see what impact it has had) The only thing is your temps could be out as Gretzky said and the only real way to test this is to get some sort of external tempretaure probe.... When testing memory overclocks I have always used a program called prime95 (a goole search will turn it up), it's free and is a distributed mathmatics program with an inbuilt stress tester which rwally works out the memory sub-systems.... it's a bit like seti but to the mathematics community.... This will full test if your memory settings are stable..... if not it will just return errors but you shouldn't fry anything. Hope this helps
