Have you ever thought of bumping up the front side bus one night only to find yourself reinstalling your operating system the next day. Some people are dissapointed when they can't even get 100 MHz out of their processors even though they are being cooled by a waterblock. They automatically think they were foolish or stupid. They believe that thier processors were hacked at a limestone quarry instead of being carved out of living ivory by the hand of God. This line of thinking would have made sense back in the old days of 0.25 micron fabrication and maybe even 0.18 micron. as well. however as 0.13 micron being the standard today, it no longer comes down to the luck of the draw or the quality of the fabrication. You can find out a great deal about your processor and estimate how far you will successfully O/C it before you even buy it. Please explain?- Throughout the term of a processor life cycle the processor will go through several steppings or versions. Stepping simply reffers to revisions in die or core design by processor manufacturers. Every stepping indicates a change in the cpu manufacturing process, which ussually has an impact on physical charactheristics, such as maximum temperature and wattage of the cpu, pipeline depth, core voltage, transistor arrangement, sillicon layers and a myriad of other things. intel pulled off 2 GHz on 0.18 micron fabrication with the d0 stepping . this started at 1500 MHz, But never broke through 2. GHz. To go faster Intel moved to 0.13 micron and a new stepping- several in fact, before topping out at 2.6 GHz. The message here is that some cpu's have little or no overhead left at some point of the manufacturing process.
I am the owner of an XP1700+ JIUHB Stepping cpu. It might not sound impressive but if you check out http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD01MzY= you will find out this is an extremely overclockable stepping. My current motherboard is an ecs k7s5a which is a pathetic overclocker. So I am planning on getting an ABIT NF7-s for the sole intent of overclocking my processor. And i am thinking about replacing my 256 MB of pc 2100 with dual channel pc 3200. And replacing my heatsink with a specialist cooler.
The JIUHB stepping has been overclocked to 2.6 GHz but some have not even reached 2 GHz. But according to many hardware forum's, most of the JIUHB's will do 2 GHz @ stock volts.
I am the owner of an XP1700+ JIUHB Stepping cpu. It might not sound impressive but if you check out http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD01MzY= you will find out this is an extremely overclockable stepping. My current motherboard is an ecs k7s5a which is a pathetic overclocker. So I am planning on getting an ABIT NF7-s for the sole intent of overclocking my processor. And i am thinking about replacing my 256 MB of pc 2100 with dual channel pc 3200. And replacing my heatsink with a specialist cooler.
The JIUHB stepping has been overclocked to 2.6 GHz but some have not even reached 2 GHz. But according to many hardware forum's, most of the JIUHB's will do 2 GHz @ stock volts.