upgrade advice - whole system or just video

[Althornin]

NTFS>FAT32 in every way possible....

 

[Dave Baumann]

Saem,

The P4T-E had it's clock generator change specifically to be able to produce a better signal. I believe it's possible to easily head upwards of 600MHz, provided your RAM can handle it.

Unfortunately the P4T-E only facilitates overclocking to 133MHz FSB; certainly though the BIOS at least, I’ve never tried the dipswitches before.

thomase

Regarding the 850 boards.... What if you overclock the fsb 33% to 533mhz, but then set the memory clock ratio so that it thinks its using PC600 RDRAM (3/1)? Effectively, the memory will stay non-overclocked at PC800 speed. Is this possible?

I can see no reason why not – now that I’ve got a Northwood in here I might give that a go myself actually…

I guess that still leaves the issue of PCI/AGP speeds though....

I think its been pointed out before (from one of Tom’s articles) that if you overclock in 33Mhz steps then the AGP/PCI actually drops back to its nominal rate in the Hub architecture; I believe this may still apply for i845/850, although I;ve yet to have it definitively confirmed. The dipswitch overclock options on the P4T-E do allow separate PCI/AGP & FSB clockings but I do not know the flexibility of it as I’ve never tried it.

If I decide to switch from Win98SE to WinXP, should I also convert from FAT32 to NTFS? What is the gamer/enthusiast angle on FAT32 vs. NTFS?

The moment I installed XP I converted to NTSF; my initial reaction was that it wasn’t as speedy as Win32, but that could well be attributed to the extra functionality the WinXP Explorer has (thumbnails etc); it certainly doesn’t seem as fast for file searching.

 

[thomase]

I can see no reason why not – now that I’ve got a Northwood in here I might give that a go myself actually…

I'm interested in finding out if this works. It's not often that you can get a nice CPU overclock without being limited by other system components.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Mmmmmm - didn't like it straight off (133Mhz FSB & 3X RAMBUS multiplier); anyone have a guess at what voltage the Northwood should have at 2.66GHz?

 

[thomase]

Oops. Too bad its not a 1.6A. I hear they get up to 2133 real easily.