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Yes, not too long ago I was making fun of those "Idiots" that run around overclocking their PC's. After all if you want a 1GHz system buy a 1GHz processor. What sense does it make to save $100 on the processor and then spend $200 on mods to make it run stable. All I can say is it is addictive, dangerous, habit forming etc. etc. It started simply enough. I had a PIII-500 that was getting a little long in the tooth (read that as too damn slow) and decided to upgrade. I wanted to keep it cheap and decided on a AMD processor to keep costs down. I picked an ASUS A7V motherboard. It's fairly inexpensive, has been out for a while, and gets good reviews. I decided to get a Duron 850 processor to go with it, it was at a great price even though the chip is fairly new. Well since I wanted to keep the PIII running that meant I needed a new case, video card, soundcard, and ram. I kept it simple, an Evga NVidia GeForce -2MX, a high quality fast agp video card but inexpensive. A SoundBlaster live sound card and 256MB of PC133 ram. Well the company I bought the parts from ran out of Duron and substituted a Athlon (T-Bird) 850 in its place. Everything went together smoothly and soon I had my windows reinstalled and moving smoothly at 850 MHz. Well it turns out the T-Bird is a capable chip and all that is required to "un-lock" the chip is to close the L1 bridges on the surface. Broke out the drafting pencil and "etched" in the traces and now the 8.5x multiplier could be changed. I upped it to 900 MHz and all was fine. However the temperature (T-Birds run hot) bothered me so I looked for a better cooling solution then the stock heat sink. I decided on a SwiftTech MC370-0A HSF which Tomshardware gave great reviews to. Also ordered a CoolerMaster ATC-200M case (improved cooling). After those changes the system was running cooler then it was stock 850. 950MHz soon followed and after a few days insuring it was stable the holy grail of 1GHz. Now I was hooked. A few mods and my system is running sweet as can be at 1GHz. Rock solid stable, runs for nonstop and no glitches at all. But the evil OC bug has got me. |