P4 3.00GHz : how hot & fast?

timclyma said:

Hi.

I've got an "Intel Pentium 4 530 3.0GHz HT Socket 775 800Mhz 1MB Cache CPU".

1. What is the highest speed to which it can be safely overclocked to?

2. What is the optimum operational temperature band within which it should run?

Advice is very much appreciated.

Thanks all.

Tim Clyma.

Click to expand...

You can overclock it until you run out of clock speed if it will do it. But usually the limitations are either the CPU or the Ram becomes unstable at some point.

Somewhere along the line you reach a point of diminishing returns because Ram performance may have to be reduced to get the CPU up to it's maximum stable speed or the other way around.

At some point you will have to raise voltages beyond stock to get anymore speed out of the chips and that is where the temperatures start to rise alot and the danger of damage increases.

The goal is to find the best all around benchmark for the system as a whole without extreme temperatures and voltages. This often requires many hours of making adjustments then testing stability, repeating the process over and over until the optimum safe and stable performance is achieved.

Overclocking will reduce the life of your system and may fry it. Even the experts fry components because there is no way to know when you have done too much. Each component is different from the next even if it came from the same batch.