OC-ing ASUS A7V333, Best vid card for?

[Xyllian]

Hi all,

I have an ASUS A7V333 with 512MB of OCZ PC-3200 and an Athlon 1800+ (core speed 1.53 Ghz)

I want to overclock the memory and board as fast as I can... currently my Athlon is still locked but through BIOS I am able to get these results with no crashes:

1.690 Mhz (12.5x multiplier, 147/37)
WCPUID says "System Bus: 294Mhz DDR" (147 x 2)

If I go any higher in BIOS settings than 147/37, the system starts locking up during 3DMark2001 SE Benchmarks.

This leads me to think that the vid card is limiting my OC-ing on this board, am I right? Or is it the board itself? Surely it is not the RAM.

With the VIA 333 chipset, the board should be able to go up to 333mhz, right?

Any idea what could be causing the system to lock up? I thought maybe it was my vid card because it starts locking up during 3DMark. I had an ATI Radeon 8500LE but I sent it back when I discovered it was only running at 230/230mhz. I could only tweak it to 240/240 with Powerstrip before it would start artifacting.

I want to buy a new video card for <$200 USD, so I was thinking of the Gigabyte Radeon 8500 which is a bit faster and has better cooling. Any other recommended cards for that price? Do I need a certain card to keep my system from locking up?

Right now I'm running my old Riva TNT2 32MB vid card until I decide what new card to get, but strangely I get the same mobo overclockability with this old card as the Radeon 8500. That leads me to think maybe the vid card is not the source of the lockups?

Thanks for any advice!


__________________
-= Overclocking Newbie =-
Athlon XP 1800+ @ 1690mhz
FSB oc'd to 147/37
Asus A7V333 mobo
512MB of OCZ PC-3200 DDR RAM
Dragon Orb 3 HSF @ 47 C @ max load
Western Digital 80 GB IDE HD

[Jimstep]

PNY makes a great video board with quality memory and parts.

[DABSON!~]

Buy a Retail 64meg 275Core and 275=550 Memory from ATI.....

[Strat]

It probbaly aint your Graphics card that limiting.

My guess would be that 1 or more of your PCI cards is bottoming out as overclking the FSB means great PCI frequencies also, thus increasin the PCI seed from 33Mhz to about 37/38. The highest i've seen anyone go is 45Mhz on the PCI bus, but he only had 1 PCI card, it was a USB expansion I think.


Because PCI cards aren't really made with OCing in mind, like CPU's, Mobo's and Vid Cards are, these usually (on good systems anyway) will bottom out first.

[Xyllian]

Okay, that makes sense, I was thinking it might be one of my other PCI cards.

I only have two PCI cards installed:

1) LinkSys 10/100 Ethernet NIC

2) Promise Ultra 66 IDE Controller (currently running my ZIP drive only)

So is that the only way to overclock my RAM, by speeding up the FSB?

Or can I somehow overclock the RAM indepently from the FSB?

[Strat]

Well, in my experience, the things that like to be OC'd the least..............are NIC's.

Upping the FSB is the way of topping the speed freq's, but to add greater stability, if your BIOS has support, you could up the DDR Voltage slighty.

My DDR Voltage is @ 2.65, its much more stable with a higher voltage at higher FSB. This is also true with CPU's. My XP is at core of 1.775 instead of 1.75. I was considering leaving it at 1.8, but it's more than stable now and it's better for the CPU because its at a slightly lower temp with the 1.775.


Dude just play around for a while and find the most stable setup. Afterall, each system even with the same parts, is slighty different. Each is unique.

[[ja] LoCo]

wait just a lil longer for the Geforce Ti4200 to come out u will happy u did