My overclocking experiences ...
What I've got running now (still) is an old Pentium at 166 MHz with a motherboard
with an 440VX chipset. So a few days ago I started reading more intently on overclocking,
and got it into my mind that I just have to get more out of my system. Well, as it turned
out, my motherboard only supports 60 or 66 MHz bus speeds and the multipliers 1.5,2,2.5 and 3.
(and the P166 was naturally configured for 2.5*66MHz.)
So, starting from that, I naturally wanted to get the most out of it, and tried to overclock it
by increasing the multiplier since the bus speed was already maxed out. So from an attempt to run
the CPU at 200 (3*66) MHz the only result was a blank screen at boot-up, and that caused
me to abandon that idea. (Heat production could be propably countered, but I have no clue as to
what could be done when the system locks up immediately).
The next (and only other possible upgrading) possibility was then to go for 180 (3*60) MHz.
This ran just fine, and at least for a few hours of Heroes 3 no problems occurred. But the downside to this is that by cutting down the
bus speed the actual speed increase is minimal if even existent. A 2% increase to the CPU speed
(calculated from http://cpu.simplenet.com/clockperf.htm)
and most propably decreased overall performance (as is hinted in the table below) and the possible
extra wear on the CPU just didn't make it seem worthwhile, so now my CPU is back to 166 MHz and
I'm thinking about the possibilities of obtaining a motherboard with capabilities of perhaps 75 MHZ
bus speeds for a very cheap price (no sense in putting any money in that system exept for the fun
of fiddling around with it.. :) )...
WinTune 98 Offline Test Results for my system:
| Performance at 166 (66*2.5) MHz |
Performance at 180 (60*3) MHz |
| CPU | (1) Intel Pentium@167 MHz |
| Video Board: | Matrox Millennium II PowerDesk
| | Video Mode: | 800x600@16bits/pixel
| | RAM: | 96 MB
| | OS: | Windows 95 4.0.950
|
| CPU Integer: | 378.3495 MIPS
| | CPU Floating Point: | 181.9787 MFLOPS
| | Video(2D): | 28.49901 MPixels/s
| | Direct3D: | 42.02487 MPixels/s
| | OpenGL: | 4.502054 MPixels/s
| | Memory: | 138.6907 MB/s
| | Cached Disk: | 21.12426 MB/s
| | Uncached Disk: | 2.94838 MB/s
|
|
| CPU | (1) Intel Pentium@183 MHz |
| Video Board: | Matrox Millennium II PowerDesk
| | Video Mode: | 800x600@16bits/pixel
| | RAM: | 96 MB
| | OS: | Windows 95 4.0.950
|
| CPU Integer: | 381.6352 MIPS
| | CPU Floating Point: | 209.0145 MFLOPS
| | Video(2D): | 27.68574 MPixels/s
| | Direct3D: | 42.05554 MPixels/s
| | OpenGL: | 4.387641 MPixels/s
| | Memory: | 135.1567 MB/s
| | Cached Disk: | 20.31369 MB/s
| | Uncached Disk: | 2.972825 MB/s
|
|
Interesting sources of overclocking information:
Matti Aksela