overclocking pentium 2

[jjzcp]

About a month ago, i bought a SEANIX pentium 2 350MHz with USB at a semi anual town flee-market, for five bucks. I also had 128 MB of ram, and the best part was it had a decent grafics card ( i just found out tonight)! It is an ATI RADEON AGP card with 32MB of vram. Anywho, i bought a couple games, (Need for Speed underground, Battle field 1942, and battlefield vietnam) and it turns out i need a ATI, or NVIDIA card, but my main computer had a VooDoo card so they don't work. Battle field askes for at least a 500MHz processor, and a video card with 32MB vram which i already have in the pentium 2. The pentium 2 runs battlefield 1942, but very choppy. So do any of you guys (and Gals) know where there is instructions to over clock it?
here is the mobo serial = MBSCBX-21

 

[mngrif]

SEANIX? New to me.

Normal Intel slot-1 CPUs aren't always easy to be overclocked, and without some serious cooling, it isn't really worth it.

Otherwise, with Pheonix BIOS, you can set a jumper to enter "configuration" mode and set the CPU clock doubler, bus speed, and voltage (if you're lucky). If you screw up and give it a horribly wrong value, just pull the battery and mains. Should reset just fine.

For the record, my P2-400 refuses to run at any clock speed other than 400MHz. I'm not sure why though...

Google will be your friend on this one.

As for games, snag a copy of Half Life that doesn't use that STEAM crap. Also Unreal Tournament was *made* for a voodoo card

Likewise with Quake 3: Arena.

 

[dpatten]

Don't bother trying to overclock it.

You should be able to easily find PII 450 cartridges on Ebay for ~$5.

Second, if you look up the motherboard, you can probably find a BIOS update that will let you run Slot 1 Pentium III Cartridges up to around 600 Mhz. This will give you the SSE 3d instruction set. and faster cache. These are also ~$5-10 on Ebay. My old machine was an Asus P2B-DS dual proc. board with an updated Bios and Dual PIII-600s.

If you have your heart set on overclocking, a third option is to get a Celeron 300A. This would be my choice. These typically, but not always, can be overclocked to 450 Mhz easily since they are supposed to run on a 66mhz bus. I ran one in this overclock configuration for 5 years with standard cooling and had no problems. While the Celeron has only 128K of L2 cache, It runs at full speed (450 Mhz overclocked) PII cache runs at 1/2 speed. So, typically the overclocked Celerons will match or surpass PII on benchmarks.

 

[carlsson]

You have to consider clock multiplier, bus speed, core voltage and not at least memory speed. A Celeron 300A, designed for 4.5x66 = 300 MHz can be run at 4.5x100 = 450 MHz if the board and RAM chips support 100 MHz bus. Ditto for PII-400/450 CPUs, they often were designed for a certain bus speed, so if your motherboard only supports 66/68/75/83 MHz bus, the CPU would run slower than intended. A higher bus speed than the memory supports will cause a crash prone computer.

 

[atari2600a]

I know this is off topic (Kinda), but I need some info.

I'm planning to overclock my PIII next week (I can't now because my pc only has 2 CPU fans; No other fans), & I was just wondering: What should I set my motherboard's CPU Tempurature alarm to? In other words, how hot is too hot? I think it goes up to 250F or around there.

Any other info on overclocking a PIII will be useful. My BIOS has it automatically set to 3x135MHz=405MHz (My motherboard/BIOS is capable of 1250MHz w/ the Multiplier & Bus speed maxed out). I have no idea of what exact type of CPU it is (It hasn't been removed since my step-father put the cartridge in the motherboard 5+ years ago), but I can find out.

 

[carlsson]

The CPU will probably have a code printed on it where you can determine original bus speed and multiplier. I don't know what is the usual working temperature for a Pentium III, but maybe somewhere around 70C (160F)? 250F sounds like you're slowly cooking a turkey. I'm sure if you search around, you will find other forums and how-tos specialized on overclocking, telling you all the do:s and don't:s.