overclocking help

[judge john]

well i did what you said and it's 200. 133 only appears when you enable overclocking in the bios. as such i think that 133 is the default setting when overclocking as it's making sure you don't accidentally overclock maybe. i left it at 133 and applied the settings. when i went into windows it showed my FSB as 133 and i had therefore reduced the power of the processor. so i went back to my bios and put it up to 205 and it worked fine.

[SuperSparks]

OK, that's good. The nice thing about Intel CPU's, is that they make far more of the fastest models than they can actually sell. So you very often get a faster CPU that has simply been marked at a lower rating. It's quite possible that your 3.0GHz is really a 3.2 or 3.4, and as long as the RAM can take the extra you may be able to get to those frequencies without actually overclocking the CPU at all.

[judge john]

well i haven’t had much look. got the FSB at 210 now meaning a speed of 3.15GHz but i seem to have problems past that. i have had it running at just under 3.4GHz and that seems to be fine at everyday tasks like surfing the net, word processing etc. the problem come when i play BF2. it immediately starts to crash and the maximum value i seem to be able to play BF2 on is 210. The blue screens that come up above that value talk about driver problems and other RAM related problems so i assume my memory doesn’t like it too much. so is there anything else i can do to help? like increase the power to the mem or something else. And can you overclock without increasing the memory clock?

[SuperSparks]

If your BIOS allows it, you can try upping the memory voltage a little bit. Other than that though, all you can really do is buy some faster RAM.

You can clock the CPU and RAM independently with some motherboards, but you really don't want to, you're likely to lose the syncronisation between the CPU and memory and actually undo the benefits of the overclock, by making the CPU wait longer to fetch it's data.