Suddenly I have lots of OCing headroom, and I never did anything!

edited March 2004 in Hardware
Well ever since I got my new BIOS from badflash.com, my CPU temps have been rather high (59*C under load), and the CPU needed .025v more to stay stable at it's OCed speed of 11x210. After a couple months of these temps, I got sick of it and decided to get to the bottom of why it was so darn high all of a sudden.

First I brought the multi to 10.5, keeping the same FSB as before (210), and lowering the vcore back to .7. The comp stayed both stable (and cool) for the next few hours. Feeling crazy, I upped the FSB to 215. Now, in the past, the FSB would NEVER have been stable at this speed, and would have crashed 5 minutes after windows booted, but it stayed stable. I then tried 220, then 225, then 230.... all the way up to 250, when the BIOS crashed on CMOS settings.

I thought I was going nuts! I've never, EVER had gotten the FSB stable beyond 210, and the only hardware I changed on the board was the BIOS from badflash... could this have been what made the difference?

Anyways, I backed down the FSB to 240, edited the CMOS settings a bit more detailed than beforehand, and saved the CMOS settings. The comp rebooted, but rather than POSTing, I got a beep code, which was a long beep, a second and a half pause, another long beep, second and a half pause... and on it would go until I shut it down AND cleared the CMOS.

Now, since it started doing this, I can't seem to POST higher than 220 w/o the said beep code... Where'd that come from? It was going much higher before the BIOS failed at the CMOS setup when I hit 250, and now I'm stuck at 220 unless I want to get the beep code and clear the CMOS? How can I get it back to the way it was before the beep code?

Also, have others been able to achieve higher speeds with nothing more than a new BIOS chip?

Comments

  • edited March 2004
    Well now I have it up to 235x10, slowly bringing up the FSB with 1mhz increases.

    Not that I'm complaining, but this is nuts!
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited March 2004
    Perhaps the bad bios chip you replaced was not properly handling some esoteric latency setting or something. Your new chip may have corrected this. I'm basing this on the fact that lot's of hacked bios bin's allow for greater control over subtle settings.

    This is an interesting situation, if you discover what caused this it may be a real help to others OC'ing the same board.
  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited March 2004
    What BIOS was on the chip before and the one they sent you. Some BIOS versions are better than others for OCing. On the NF7 10d is supposed to be the best.
  • edited March 2004
    The same BIOS version that I had used before is what I am using now (v. 2).

    It MIGHT be the divider I'm using... I want to test it though to be sure. Normally I'd use 6/6, but by chance I used (and have been using) 4/4. I'll put it back on 6/6, and see what happens.

    I have already found that having "CPU interface" enabled would cause the computer to not POST, so this option is definatly a factor. Although before I was able to hit such a high FSB, this option hadn't made a diffrence.

    Now it does, and in a big way.
  • LawnMMLawnMM Colorado
    edited March 2004
    Is it prime stable? I can post above 250 but it ain't reliable...
  • edited March 2004
    Well I haven't tried Prime, but it has been folding w/o a hitch for the past 2 days.
  • edited March 2004
    Hi everybody!
    I have brought a ABIT NF7 ver2.0 and I'm new in overclocking, my friend told me that this board is a gread board for overclocking. Here's my spec below:

    Abit NF7 ver2.0 motherboard
    AMD Athlon XP2000+ processor (266mhz)
    Termal Take Volcano 7 10,000RPM Heatsink/fan
    ELSA GeForce2 GTS PRO 32MB DDR AGP
    256MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM
    Maxtor 40GB 7200 RPM ATA133 HDD
    Lite-on 52x32x52 CD-RW Drive
    Samsung 16X DVD Rom

    Can anyone please give me an advise on how the best performance it can be?
    How to overclock the processor? How's the setting and what's the step?

    Thank you.
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