Tips for Overclocking a P233 MMX?

[Gouki]

Hello all--

For a while now I've had a fair amount of spare parts from different PC's...hand me downs, etc...and I've finally decided to build a PC out all of it.

The motherboard is by PC Chips and the highest it will support is a Pentium 233 MMX. At that speed...the clock multiplier is 3.5 and the bus speed is 66mhz. The board can run to 75 and up to 83mhz. And if I remember right...the clock multiplier goes up to 5.5.

My question is...how over clockable is this chip...and what's the highest I can tweak it?

Thanks in advance for your replies...

Gouki.

[grandslammer]

Hi! I had a pentium 200mmx. You can't change the multiplier (well, you can, but it won't work) but you can change the front side bus speed. Bump it to 75 mhz. If you don't post or run stable, bump your core voltage up to 2.9 volts. Should do fine. You may possibly have to go to 3.0 volts for a while, but I doubt it.

By going to 75mhz fsb, you'll get like 263. You may be able to get a stable 83mhz fsb, in fact, the only chip I ever had that would do well at 83mhz fsb was the 200mmx. That would give you like 291 mhz.

Now if you have pc 100 ram, and it'll fly at 83mhz fsb, you will see a drastic improvement because you not only have a faster overall chip, but a faster fsb to communicate with memory too. So your actual speed increase will be double fold.

So there is your highest speed scenario, and you should see a difference even at 75mhz.

Whew, must've had too much coffee, I'll stop my rant now...

good luck with it...

M

[Ed_S]

The 233's I've had were not locked at all, and would accept both multiplier and FSB changes. (have heard MANY times that the 200 was, though http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif)

Mine would do up to 290 (3.5x83) and would boot at 300 but crash quickly. Was most stable at 285 (3x95) 2.9v.

Ed

[Keermalec]

Hi Gouki, I have a 233 MMX o/ced to 292 (3.5x83 MHz). I had to:

1. Set the FSB to 83
2. Up the voltage from 2.8 to 2.9
3. Put in a large heatsink with lotsa thermal paste.
4. Put two case fans, one in front, one behind.

Its been running smoothly at 292 for over a year now. My periferals seem to accept the extra 25% speed, but not all necessarilly will. I have:

Diamond Fire GL Pro video card
Adaptec UW SCSI controller
Standard Seagate 5400 rpm hard drive
UW SCSI hardrive from Quantum
HP 6900 IDE CD engraver
64 Megs of standard 66 MHz RAM

Good luck.

[Gouki]

First of all, thanks for all the replies thus far... :-)

Got another question. The fan/heatsink combo I have is fairly big...how important is it that I use thermal paste to attach it to the chip?

Ie...how will this affect me wanting to overclock? Will I still be able to overclock without the paste? Or just won't be able to overclock as high?

Thanks in advance...

Gouki

[Gouki]

Did a little looking around...and I found the SysOpt guide to Overclocking...and read the article about the importance of Thermal Paste.

So...tomorrow I'll stop by Radio Shack and pick some up. ;-)

Gouki

[akaBruno]

I had my 166mmx to 250. It sounds that w/ your mobo you can beat that. Mine did it at 83fsb, but wouldn't run at 100, even w/ good RAM. Some do though. I hope you're laughing when you smoke it.

[shadow]

Just a word on thermal paste, heat sink grease, whatever you want to call it.
I replaced a noisey fan on my PII350 and noticed there was no grease between the heatsink and the cpu. I bought this thing new! So I put some on and re-assembled it. My cpu temp dropped 7 degrees C, from 40 down to 33. The noisey fan ran at the correct rpm, it was just noisey for a few minutes when cold.
I also have a 166mmx that I did have at 210@83fsb but kept getting corrupted data on my old hard drive. I have a new WD now but havent had the nerve to go back to 83, I have it at 75 for a cpu speed of 188.
PW

[Gouki]

Just an update for you peeps...

Tried bumping up the voltage to 2.9 and the fsb to 83...and nothing. Not a **** thing.

Knocked it down to 75mhz and it ran good for like 5 minutes...then it crashed. Tried a few more times with the same results.

*sigh* Oh well...thx again for all the good advice!

Gouki

[falcompsx]

I have a 233 P2, in a BF6 and i OC'd it to 350 with no problems, it's made in phillipines, and with pc133 memory at 100fsb and all dividers set and a big @$$ athlon dual fan/heatsink, it runs just fine and hasn't crashed yet(i'm writing this reply with it)
why do i have a bx board and pc133 mem you are asking? simple...soon i'm getting a coppermine..but first i need money and upgraded my board and mem and just overclocked my chip as much as i could, i tried for 400, but it won't boot that high
my voltage i need to up from 2.8 all the way to 3.0 too, so it may be @#$%#ing up my chip, but oh well