Overclocking

The Overclocking

The P3-800E uses the 100MHz FSB and an 8X multiplier. To overclock the chip you have to increase the bus speed since Intel "clock locks" its chips. This prevents unscrupulous vendors from adjusting a chip's multiplier setting and selling the overclocked chip as a higher speed grade. As usual we used Abit's BE6-II to adjust the FSB speeds. Abit's Softmenu III allows us to adjust the FSB in 1MHz increments.

We started overclocking in 5MHz increments at 1.65V. We flew past 840MHz, 880MHz, and 920MHz. We were able to boot into Windows at 960MHz, but Quake 3 would crash when we tried running a timedemo. We upped the voltage to 1.8, and that fixed the timedemo problem. Unfortunately, problems in 3DMark indicated that the system still wasn't stable. We bumped the speed down a notch to 952MHz, and the system ran fine. Yes, we did try for 1GHz. The system was able to POST, but blue screened repeatedly while loading Windows. Let's move on to the next CPU.

Right off the bat we tried for 1GHz with the second CPU. The system was able to POST and get into Windows, but it failed to run a timedemo. We didn't bother trying to increase the voltage since it was already set to 1.85V. We slowly stepped down speeds from there, and the CPU eventually settled at 976MHz for a healthy %22 gain.

Test System

Intel Pentium 3 800E@800MHz(8 x 100MHz)
Intel Pentium 3 800E@976MHz(8 x 122MHz)
Abit BE6-II motherboard
Apacer 128MB PC133 SDRAM

Western Digital Caviar ATA-66 hard drive

Elsa GLADIAC GeForce 2 GTS
Driver version: Detonator 5.16

Windows 98 SE

Benchmarks

3DMark2000 - 800x600x16
3DMark2000 - 800x600x32
3DMark2000 - 1024x768x16
3DMark2000 - 1024x768x32

Quake 3 Retail - 512x384 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 640x480 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 800x600 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1024x768 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1280x1024 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1600x1200 Fastest, Normal, High Quality

Nocturne - 512x384x16
Nocturne - 512x384x32
Nocturne - 1024x768x16
Nocturne - 1024x768x32