Hey, you mad tweakers out there!

I've got a new Athlon 1800+ XP in a Gigabyte GA-7VRX with 256MB of PC2700 DDR SDRAM running Windows 2000 Pro. The only way I've found to overclock it is to run Gigabyte's own EasyTune software, which only controls the CPU clock speed and doesn't allow any tweaking of voltage levels, but does control the CPU independently of the RAM and FSB clock speeds (which is a Good Thing).

I run distributed.net so the CPU is running flat out pretty much all the time, and the temperatures are reasonable (50degC for the stock standard clock speed). Now I can push the CPU clock speed base up from 100MHz (which gives around 1150MHz CPU clock) up to about 113MHz running d.net alone (mostly CPU, little HDD or peripheral work). But if I want to run anything else (pretty much) I have to go down to about 106MHz or it crashes almost instantly. Even on 105MHz it's been known to crash in various kernel drivers running d.net by itself.

Now I know these things are supposed to be overclockable to the max. I've had my 366 MHz Celeron running at 495MHz. But I can't seem to get this, or my PIII 1GHz to overclock at all. I've even got a Volcano 9 cooler on the Athlon, which I've gradually wound up to noticeable but not-yet-quite-annoying levels to try and keep the thing cool in case that's the problem.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

P.S. I didn't want to post this on a regular overclockers board because of the sheer amount of wading you have to do through the quagmire of "Look at my k3wl case mod!" and "512MB PC333 SDRAM? l33t!" inanities, only to find that I've asked a question so dumb that no-one can even bother to think about helping me.

Thanks in advance,

Paul

This seems to be a good guide to overclocking the Athlon. Covers your FSB overclock method, as well as a hardware mod to unlock the multiplier on the processor, allowing for more stable overclocking.

I also found this guide complete with a video, though this method looks a bit more dangerous and harder to reverse if a mistake occurs.

Unfortunatly I have no personal experience to insert here with the Athlons and overclocking though.