tim hall wrote: >Last Sunday 25 July 2004 03:53, Rick B was like: > > >>>I think I might read it now. I'm a bit confused as to why my system thinks >>>it's running a 896MHz CPU, But so far there's no overt signs that it isn't >>>happy, so I'll prod it a bit and see ;-) >>> >>> > > > >>Yeah that's close enough to 900mhz for me. Some cpu's are noted as being >>good overclockers, but, hell, that's a free 50% overclock! The new sweet >>spot for OCer's is the mobile athlon 2500/2600 (~$90US), out of the box >>they are ~1800 to 1900mhz and are easily hitting 2500mhz on air cooling >>with just a little extra voltage. The Pentium 2.4b's were easily hitting >>3Ghz. >> >> > >>From what I've just read it seems the Celeron Coppermines may not be rated >performance-wise, but they overclock to 900MHz like it was a perfectly >natural thing to do. If my clock ratio is fixed to 9x, this would explain. > >It's running a little warmer than at 66.8MHz x 8 = 566, (? clock ratio) but >nothing you could cook on. I've installed cpuburn to my HD, really I want to >run it from a floppy, like memtest86. Just in case ;-) > >AFAICT, so long as I keep it cool enough, it could well be stable at this >setting. TBH I'd say it's actually performing like a well tuned 600. Which is >what I want. We will see :-] I think it helps that I'm using harmonic ratios >based on the recommended defaults. > >How hot is too hot? I've got my warning level set to 50deg in the BIOS and I >still don't think I'm running under 40. It's hard to tell without rebooting, >unfortunately although I have both the hardware and software for i2c & hwmon >they're not talking at present. Again, it's something I never really bothered >with before. Most of the heat is coming off the power supply. > >What started out as an idle comment has turned into a bit of a journey of >discovery! Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. > >cheers > >tim hall > > > > 50 degrees C is not very hot, from my experience. Especially if you did not turn up the voltage on your CPU. Most processors have thermal cuttoffs that kick in around 80C. Under high load (~95% CPU utilization) my Athlon 2500 that is OCed will run at about 50C and that is with the default voltage, and that is about the norm from what I have read. Without a load it runs ~40C. Raising your CPU voltage is what will get you into trouble, as part of the extra power is turned into heat. That's the reason some of the hardcore overclockers will use water and peltier methods to keep their CPU's cool. Although the water and peltier combo results in very low CPU temps (~around the freezing point *sometimes*) it results in condensation problems. Rick B