Overclocking P4 2.53Ghz

[Euro98ITR]

I have a P4 2.53Ghz and a Biostar Motherboard SCK478P4X266E. Its not great stuff but I bought it 2 years ago as a bargain!!

Recently I was browsing the Bioster site and found an utility called "Warpspeeder" This claims to overclock the CPU etc.. etc.. Im much not into this stuff. I installed it and it worked fine. The program gives you the right to choose the amount you want to overclock and then tests the sytem to see if it crashes. If it crashes it will automatically resets the pc and reduce the overclock percentage. The utility has a monitor which show the following values :

CPU Speed - 2759.4 MHz
CPU Clock - 145 Mhz
Memory Clock - 145 Mhz
AGP Clock - 72.5 Mhz
Over clock Percentage 108%

Do you think that this program does any harm? or that it is not safe?
I didnt notice much difference after I installed it?

 

[Big B]

Probably not. I don't know how good it is. Depending on the voltages available to you, you probably can hit around 3GHz. However, the biggest thing that could keep you from doing that is the lack of a PCI/AGP lock. This does depend on what other devices you have in the system too, but since you've got a CPU based on the Northwood core, it should scale fairly well. Not guaranteed, but you've got something to play with.

Personally, what I use for stability testing is Prime 95 to stress the CPU, and if you're tweaking your memory, get memtest x86 on floppy or the .iso to burn to CD (which you boot off of and it runs until you reboot).

Most of the old-school OC crowd aren't exactly warm to an in-Windows OC tool. Now, MSI's CoreCell and Abit's uGuru hardware/software OC tool combinations seem to be changing that. However, the main thing with a software OC tool is that it's a program. During overclocking, exceeding the limitations of the CPU can affect stability, part of which can lead to program lockups. This can be a problem with the software OC tools if they lock up.

I've not dealt with Biostar at all, but they seem to be more of a budget-oriented company, much like ECS, Asrock, and Shuttle. WarpSpeeder is basically Biostar's custom OC tool, which is nothing new. The reason that you don't hear about these programs often is because the overclocking folks just really don't use them, preferring to OC through BIOS instead.