Can I overclock a P2?

[mendhak]

As some of you know, I have the oldest PC of all in VBF. I have a P2/333Mhz, 160MB RAM... and er...

Is it possible to overclock this? How unsafe/safe is it? Also, does this safety factor depend upon the length of usage of my machine?

[JungleMan]

Did you custom build? What brand is it?

[HarryW]

Can you do it? Well, probably, just barely, if your motherboard supports changing front side bus frequencies in small (like 1 or 2 MHz) increments. Is it a good idea/worth it? Probably not.

Pentium IIs suck for overclocking. The Celeron 300A, which was out at roughly the same time, is probably the most overclockable chip made in recent years though. Many people got a 300A to 450 MHz and even beyond.

[Harrild]

I would to know how to "unlock" my p2 so i could overclock it.
I have:
384mb SD RAM
Abit BH6 (this can support up to a whopping 1596mhz!! 133x12)
SB Audigy Platium Ex
40Gb/5400 Seagate
40gb/5400 Fujitsu
Sony 16X DVD
Ricoh MP7063A
Realtek 8139C Network Card
ASUS V6800 Deluxe Video Card
5 Case fans
MS Intellimouse
Acer KB
17" Monitor
and <drum roll> 1.44mb floppy drive

Running
70mb DOS partition with System commander on it
WXP
W98 (first edition - clean and stable)
Linux Red Hat 5.0 (soon to be discarded)
+ 2 data partitions (1 4 music the other for everything else)

As u can see i would dearly love to be able to overclock my 'beast'...Please help

[mendhak]

Originally posted by jpbtennisman
Did you custom build? What brand is it?

It's an Acer Aspire.

After reading what harryw wrote, uhm.. so should I shouldn't I... it's branded, not custom built, so does that matter? how much do you think I could get out of that 333?

[JungleMan]

Originally posted by HarryW
Can you do it? Well, probably, just barely, if your motherboard supports changing front side bus frequencies in small (like 1 or 2 MHz) increments. Is it a good idea/worth it? Probably not.

Pentium IIs suck for overclocking. The Celeron 300A, which was out at roughly the same time, is probably the most overclockable chip made in recent years though. Many people got a 300A to 450 MHz and even beyond.

One of the most overclockable chips which has been dubbed as "The next 300A" is the P4 1.6A, a lot of people are OCing to 2.4 or 2.6Ghz on air cooling.

The AMD Athlon 1.0Ghz chip also put out some very good overclocks.

Yes the 300A is a famously OCable chip though.

[JungleMan]

Originally posted by mendhak


It's an Acer Aspire.

After reading what harryw wrote, uhm.. so should I shouldn't I... it's branded, not custom built, so does that matter? how much do you think I could get out of that 333?

Acer, I think we can chuck the idea of OCing right out the window. :D

[chrisjk]

Do it anyway

Not like it's worth anything

[JungleMan]

Originally posted by chrisjk
Do it anyway

Not like it's worth anything
No what I'm saying is I don't think it's even possible since his board probably doesn't support OC features.

[chrisjk]

ah okay

well you can break it trying ;)

[HarryW]

It doesn't really matter what motherboard you have. If you had the right kit, a P2 333 might go to 340 MHz, or maybe even 350 if you were incredibly lucky, but it would cause crashes from overheating all the time and you'd have to mess around with voltage settings and all kinds of crap.

It's just not worth doing for virtually no difference in performance.

[JungleMan]

Originally posted by HarryW
It doesn't really matter what motherboard you have. If you had the right kit, a P2 333 might go to 340 MHz, or maybe even 350 if you were incredibly lucky, but it would cause crashes from overheating all the time and you'd have to mess around with voltage settings and all kinds of crap.

It's just not worth doing for virtually no difference in performance.

I figured he'd need a mobo that supported multiplier and FSB adjustments.

Sorry but I'm not really up on my Pentium II OC knowledge :) it wasn't exactly a popular subject since as you said, they were poor OCers.

[chrisjk]

Originally posted by jpbtennisman
Sorry but I'm not really up on my Pentium II OC knowledgedoes this mean Justin is fallable?! :p

wonders will never cease ;)

[mendhak]

aah, so I have uncovered a flaw in the hardware guru. mwahahahah!!

Uhm, this was all part of my plan. :rolleyes:

well, thanks for responding then, i'll drop the idea. Perhaps when I buy a real computer, I'll try that. Till then it's me and my faithful P2.

:)

[JungleMan]

Nobody knows everything ;)

[Si_the_geek]

I have a P2 350, running safely at 434 (24% faster), I just increased the bus speed from 100 to 124 (multiplier changes were no-go).

All depends what your board can do - if you can set the bus speed manually it should be fine, just watch out for memory/disk problems if you take it too fast (I had a little disk corruption with an older hard drive at this speed).

[HarryW]

Originally posted by jpbtennisman
I figured he'd need a mobo that supported multiplier and FSB adjustments.Nah, all the production PIIs were multiplier-locked. Only FSB is do-able.

[Behemoth]

Originally posted by mendhak
As some of you know, I have the oldest PC of all in VBF. I have a P2/333Mhz, 160MB RAM... and er... my P2/333 only has 128MB RAM




:p