Ok here we go.
I've never had an AMD chip since K2 and dont know much about over clocking; but for Christmas I bought my son an Asus A7N8X deluxe mobo and a 1.6gHz 266fsb Duron with 256mB 3200 ram.

We now have the system going and thought it would be fun to try overclocking it. Can anyone give any advice as to where to start? and what to expect?

For instance do I need to muck about with a pencil on the sm resistors underneath, or short out some pins on the CPU. Any reccomendations anybody.

Easy there, i dont think they are locked so no pencil stuff necessary.
Just drop the multiplier a notch or two and up the fsb to 166. Making sure the ram is also at 166, in sync. This is all achieved in the BIOS.

Pete

Its really best to up the fsb in increments like 5-10Mhz at a tme but these chips are almost guaranteed to hit 166 so you could just go for it as i mentioned above. If you come up against any instability you can give the chip more voltage but again this ís probably not necessary.

Pete

i've dropped the multiple and upped the external frequency speed to 166mhz

haven't got around to changing the voltage yet though

i can't find the FSB settings in my BIOS though
is it possible that this is automated by the external frequency setting

Alex (dave's son)

MoBo: Asus A7N8X Deluxe V2
CPU: AMD Duron 1600
RAM: 1x PC3200 256MB (dane-elec)
GPU: PCI S3 (ooh... hold on to your hat...)

Alex, is it your birthday any time soon? If so start pestering your dad for a decent ATI card. Bellicose will give you a few bob for that old S3!

Nice spotted there Adrian. The good old S3. Thats the first piece of kit you gotta rid yourself of.
What made you purchase the said card?

If youve upped your frequency to 166 then you have indeed upped the fsb to 166, congradulations. Now dont touch the voltage. If it doesnt need it then leave that alone.
Push up the multiplier now. Try to get it back up to 12, use more volts only if it wont go any further. Is your ram also running at 333?

Pete

p.s. you are lucky that duron aint locked, see the other thread.

PCI S3,
It quite a long story really; but here goes.

A year or two ago Alex had a nics Asus PC based on a CUSL2 mobo with 1GHz P3 in it. We put a cheapish Nvidia44MX card in it and things were ok, if not wonderful, for quite a while.

Anyway the 440MX card was sold to upgrade a friends PC which had the old S3 PCI card in it. I then got Alex a SIS Xabre AG200T8-D64 which wasn't a whold lot better but seems OK apart from some funny rendering of shading.

Sadly the Asus mobo died not so long ago (northbridge chip red hot) and he's been using a tiny little Nec compact cased thing with an Intel810 based mobo, bought in a hurry as a quick replacement.

Now he has new Nforce mobo he is after a 128 MbAsus 9600XT card, I've seen them for about £145, its more than I wanted to pay but I rekon its about as good as you can get without hiking the price too much. Im left with the SIS card in my PC. If Im feeling mean Ill buy myself a 9800 card and give hime back the SIS card. He says he'l get a card soon so he's using the spare PC card.

I think its about the best card I have that will work in this mobo. we have kicking arround. AGP Matrox G400 with TV, AGP Intel815 (on loan somewhere else), ATI AIWP (quite old)

So there you have it, Ill check the memory speed later when ALex gets in. We plan to get another identical memory device to used the DDR feature and a bigger (than 8Gb) SATA drive.

Before deciding to get the Asus9600xt I was windering wether to get a PowerColor Radeon 9600 Pro EZ 256MB but reading the specs and reviews I think its a bit limited. Anyhow you get the (free) game with the Asus XT product.

Thanks for the advice, Dave (&Alex)

NO....do not get the EZ....please just dont do it man. Its a severly crippled 9600.....very low Mhz.

9600xt or 9800se if u want the mod gamble.

Pete