Having SoftMenu III is really a plus in overclocking! Nothing comes close to it. :D

I, of course, started with the usual 75MHz, and 83MHz settings first. Those FSB clocks posed no problems and I didn’t even have to step up the voltage.

A note here, for every increase in the FSB speed, I ran a few benchmarks like SisSandra and 3DMark 2000 so ensure its stability.

After that, I increased the FSB speed in 2MHz increments. At 85MHz, the CPU started to show some instability so I bumped up the voltage to 1.55V. It was the rock solid again. Next was 87MHz. Rock solid. 89MHz, no problem too.

At 91Mhz, things was fine until the second time I ran 3DMark 2000. It crashed halfway during the benchmark. I then tried bumping up the core voltage to 1.65V and even 1.7V but it was still fairly unstable. I then set the AGP divider to 1/2 and the PCI divider to 1/3 which sets the AGP and PCI bus speeds way below the default 66MHz and 33MHz respectively. Still, the system was unstable.

Although it was able to boot and run several programs for a few hours, the fact that it wasn’t rock solid stable irked me. I wouldn't want the CPU to fail on me in the middle of some critical work, do I? :D

So, the next most logical step was to decrease the FSB speed to 90MHz. I also reduced the core voltage to 1.6V, the AGP divider to 1/1 and the PCI divider to 1/2. Well, guess what, the CPU was rock solid at 810MHz (813 as reported by WCPUID)! It would run for a week and never crash.

The temperature? With the RM45 Evercool HSF,

At Idle : 32ºC
At Full Load : 42ºC
Ambient Temp : 32ºC

Well, I am confident that my CPU can at 850MHz. But then again, I could be wrong. Whatever the case is, I still think it can go higher then the 810MHz that I’m now enjoying.

So now, I’m open for any ideas and solutions. Would a new cooler help? If so, which cooler is the best? Malaysia’s ambient temperature is quite high and averages around 30-32ºC. Ouch!

I’ll be changing my sound card to the Creative SB Live! and probably pick up a Geforce2 MX card as well. I might also change the HotRod 66 card to a ATA-100 RAID card as I intend to add another hard disk soon. Would any of this help? I don’t know...