Adventures in overclocking

[rallynavvie]

Day 1: A Whole Day Wasted

So I have the next week and a half off work so I decided to wreck my neatly running workstation by overclocking it. In order for me to attain 200 FSB properly I need to trick the BIOS into seeing my 133 FSB Prestonias I need to do a hardware mod to the sockets. First of all I really need to get 30-gauge wire insulation to do this, the stuff I stripped from Cat5 wire apparently wasn't small enough to isolate the pin. I did use the speaker wire as recommended to bridge the other two pins with a small u-wire but the length was tricky: too short and it may not stay in place, too much and it may bend over and bridge other pins. I thought it felt good going into the socket though so I figured it had worked. Of course I have to do this tricky process x2...

So the hardware mod is done, I boot into BIOS and set the multi at 16 and the bus at 200 as it is pretty much that simple once the above-mentioned mod is done. I save changes and exit and the POST says two processors at 3200 and DDR400 installed, but then it won't recognize my SATA drives (which one is the boot drive). D'oh, forgot to flash to latest BIOS, still running the one that was shipped with it. So I reboot and reset to default BIOS and go into XP to make my Das Boot and flash disk with the latest BIOS. BIOS update goes smooth and I try the settings again but it won't boot. Reset CMOS and try bus settings of 199-201 and multi of 15 or 16, all combinations thereof. Nothing.

Well I couldn't leave the workstation down for the night so I put it back together. It was in "hardware testing mode", case on its side with the heatsinks just resting on the CPUs, so it wasn't too terrible undoing the hardware mod. Turns out the u-wire worked great, but the sleeving was just too big and it folded over and the pin just punched through it. Using any less would have caused the same result so I really need to find some of that tiny wire. I couldn't find 30-gauge at Radio Shack or my local geek store. The search continues...

At least I got to see it POST that high, that was pretty cool. Maybe I'll give it a try some other time. For now I have to catch up with what I was doing on it before I shut it down this morning

[redwudz]

No permanent damage; That's a good day!

I've used 30GA insulated with a wire wrapping tool. May be a little hard to find these days as hardly anybody breadboards IC circuits with wire wrap. Too bad it needs to be insulated, as that size is common on relays and solenoids. If your wires are really short, teflon insulation would be great also.

Be careful.

[glockjs]

go baby go!....*poof*....



just funnin ya. someday i might invest in a water setup

[rallynavvie]

Permanent damage? Meh. If anything it would be the processors that get broken pins or something like that. Ironically I have a pair of 3.2 Noconas here so technically I could have attained 3.2/800 just by swapping those back in, but when I had them in I got worse performance with video apps so that's why I went back to the 3.06/533 Prestonias to overclock to Nocona specs. It's a similar argument to the Northwood vs. Prescott processors. I still plan on giving it a go one of these days. The Noconas are bound for a server case in my new data cabinet or another Iwill workstation board like the DN800-SLI. I just wanted to join the "overclockers club" here

[studtrooper]

Bleh, I did a volt mod (the Asus PC-DL unfortunately lacks BIOS level voltage regulation for the processor/s and memory) for my 2.4ghz 533mhz prestonias in a attempt to get more than 400mhz each (I can get to 2.8ghz with no mods at all) out of them. While I didn't have to go as far as you with litterally "sleaving" pins (you could have cut them off I guess too), connecting pin holes with pieces of metal the size of a eyelash nearly drove me mad. While I was able to successfully complete the mod, all the progress I was able to achieve was higher temps for my Xeons Bring on fully functional Dual-Core mobos dammit!

[rallynavvie]

Yeah, the u-wire was tedious as hell but that part seemed to go the best for me. I couldn't just trim the sleeving down to the pin as it would have ridden up when the pin pushed into the socket and wouldn't have insulated it anyway. I'm lucky it was soft enough to let the pins cut through it when it folded over otherwise I would have bent some pins and I'm not steady enough to do pin repairs on a 604 processor.

The big disadvantage of the PC-DL is that it doesn't support Noconas to begin with so there is more modding required to make it support those kinds of bus speeds, that's why I didn't end up going with that. The NCCH-DL seems to be a pretty good option though on the Asus side of things. The DH800 has two 4-phase, sinked VRMs so it handles the juice of overclocking pretty well. Other than a pot mod on one of the caps you can overclock using all easily reversable mods like the BSEL and u-wire mods. Oddly it's that stability when overclocking that makes for even better reliability when running at OEM specs