Well I must say these pass few days with all the new hardware I bought I started wanting more speed and the only way to get it for free is to overclock (oh yea baby)!!!
So first up was my graphic board, I knew all that separated me from the Ultra model was a mere 50Mhz of core speed so using coolbits tweak in the Nvida drivers I overclocked my board, all seemed fine until I decided to run 3dmark 2003 to see the gains and was presented with BSOD courtesy of the nvidia graphic driver. Obviously it didn’t like overclocking so I was forced to give up that until new drivers are released.
So I turned my attention to the CPU it was already using the maximum possible multiplier (12.5x) so I my only choice was to had to bum the FSB to achieve higher speed. The thing is that I only have DDR333 RAM that didn’t overclock that well so the only safe setting was to make the FSB 200 and the RAM speed 83% of that so it would run in spec (166Mhz) and lowering the multiplier, I set it to 10.5x with gave me a 12Mhz gain, but after some testing with PCmark04 the results shown a speed decrease witch I concluded was being caused by the fact that the RAM and FSB frequency where now out of sync so I pumped the multiplier to 11x a 125Mhz gain that proved to make windows very unstable until I bumped the voltage up to 1.8v.
At last I had better scores but that was it I was unable to pull any further up, even a few MHz would make fail to boot and even at 2200MHz the CPU was running burning hot so I backed down and restored the original settings.
My conclusions were that unless I bought DDR400 or better overclocking was pretty pointless, very sad indeed…