Speed Kills

One of my less successful experiments has been in overclocking the CPUs themselves. The P6DBE has a limited range of overclocking features, and with the PIII so well multiplier-locked raising the FSB was the only option. The fastest FSB of 133Mhz was almost certainly out of the question with my mismatched-stepping Klamath die CPUs and the motley assortment of DIMMs I was using at the time, and the only other options were FSB speeds of 103 and 112. Half an hour of Unreal at the former, giving 515Mhz, appeared faultless, so I jumped to 112 - 560Mhz at the CPU, and nearly 37Mhz at the PCI bus… The latter was probably my downfall, as after another half an hour, just when I was congratulating myself and smiling over the 3DMark figures, one of my mirrored drives dropped out of sight. I panicked my way back to the stock settings and re-mirrored, and all was fine - but the Promise RAID cards are not famed for their tolerance to these sort of shenanigans, and as data-integrity has long been an obsession for my home systems I've been scared to mess with it since… However, I've since replaced the old DIMMs with a nice new set, rated for CAS2 at 133Mhz, and I may well try a longer experiment at 103Mhz FSB - the extra oomph from that 15Mhz CPU overclock was just noticeable in Unreal, and quite clear from 3DMark, so one day when I'm feeling simultaneously bored and adventurous…