[colecampbell666]

My computer is too old to play anything worthwhile (takes 5-10 minutes on the load screens on HL2, lags on SWEAW at low detail) and I figured that I should try overclocking it. It is a 1.5 Ghz CPu but in Control Panel it says "Rated to 2.25 Ghz" or the like. I figure that since I'm getting the Orange Box sometime next week, I might as well be able to play it.

Here is what CPU-Z shows:













I have an ATI Radeon 9550 Sapphire 256 Mb, and ATI Tray Tools. I want to overclock my memory, video card, CPU, and anything else overclockable. My motherboard is a Giga-Byte GA-8IDML (-C/-CH). (not sure if this is Gigabyte or another company)

[colecampbell666]

Hold on a sec'! I looked in HWiNFO32 and it says that my CPU is 209 degrees celsius! Methinks that a faulty sensor is involved.

[Jeff Vader]

Don't just overclock your memory. Get more. 512 doesn't sound good if you want to play modern games.

[colecampbell666]

We're getting a new PC within the next few months, so I don't want to spend anything on this one.

[Scuddie]

I can tell you just by looking at those screen captures that you don't have WindowsXP optimized for low memory usage.

Hit WinKey + Pause/Break (or right click my computer, select properties), go to the advanced tab, click performance settings.  Choose the option for best performance, hit apply.  Then go to the advanced tab, change your virtual memory size to 1536 min and 1536 max.  Do these things and your performance will be greatly improved.

[colecampbell666]

  No one can help me?

EDIT: I don't have enough HD space to set it to 1536 so I set it to 1 Gb on one drive and 2 Gb on the other.

[Herra Tohtori]

Well... your PC's motherboard most likely doesn't have any overclocking options whatsoever, but you might want to check if there are any in the BIOS... if it's an OEM machine, oddsa re there isn't, but it's worth checking.

If you don't have any BIOS overclocking options available, with a piece of software called ClockGen you might be able to boost the front side bus about 10 % or so directly from Windows, depends whether your motherboard (chipset) is supported or not... even a close match might work to some extent. I have my FSB speed upped from 200 MHz to 220 MHz, which makes my Athlon64 3200+ clock 2.2 GHz instead of the specified 2 GHz.

Since your CPU uses 15 as a multiplier, you would get more advantage of it - say, if you upped the bus speed to, say, 110 MHz from the previous 100 MHz, your CPU clock would go to 1650 MHz... if you were able to put it to 120 MHz or even 133 MHz, you would get 1800 and 1995 MHz, respectively.

But your memory will probably stop working and hang your PC before you get to those kind of numbers. And read the instructions carefully.

At any rate, your PC seems to only have AGPx4 graphics slot... which doesn't really give you much performance in any recent games. But it might be worth it just to experiment, especially if you're gonna get a new PC anyway so there's no much harm to be done even in worst case scenario, which would be that the PC or some of it's components will release the smoke that makes them work.

[CP5670]

Most boards didn't use async bus frequencies back then, so you can only increase the FSB by 10mhz or so before you risk hard drive corruption. The AMD processors at that time had unlocked multipliers so it didn't matter, but I don't remember whether the P4s did or not.

In any case, a simple overclock isn't going to make that system any more usable for recent games.

[colecampbell666]

Thanks for the info. My hard drives are already dying, my 160 Gb only reads as 32 Gb, but I won't do that now. I guess it is time for a new PC.

Oh and, on that note, Which is better in terms of pure performance; this or this?

EDIT: and is my video card overclockable? Or will I still have the problem with the FSB?

[Herra Tohtori]

I dunno about performance but it appears to me that NVidia's drivers work better on Vista, especially with OpenGL... for now.

...as far as I know anyway. I generally prefer NVidia so I might be biased.

[Tyrian]

You hard drive is reading as only 32GB?  That's a little odd, but before you assume drive failure, check these settings:

First, are you using WinXP Pro?

Second, right click on that drive and click Properties.  What type of file system are you using?

[colecampbell666]

I am using Pro. We've already tried every trick we could find, but nothing fixed it. Why does XPPro have anything to do with it?

[Davros]

"my 160 Gb only reads as 32 Gb"

you have it set to 32mb with a jumper

[BloodEagle]

"my 160 Gb only reads as 32 Gb"

you have it set to 32mb with a jumper

That's hilarious! 

[colecampbell666]

No. There are no jumpers as it is the slave.

[colecampbell666]

Which is better in terms of pure performance; this or this?

[Tyrian]

I am using Pro. We've already tried every trick we could find, but nothing fixed it. Why does XPPro have anything to do with it?

If you use XP Pro and you are using the FAT32 file system on your hard drive, then your maximum drive size is capped at 32GB and whatever excess space you have is left unreadable.  If you are indeed using FAT32, then you'll want to back up your data and reformat that volume into NTFS.  Or, I think there is a converter floating about on the Internet that changes your FAT32 partition to NTFS while keeping your data intact, but I've never used it, so I can't vouch for its effectiveness. 

If you do try the converter, I think it will only change the 32GB FAT32 into 32GB NTFS.  If that's the case, the remaining 128GB will be marked as RAW space.  Just format that into NTFS (you won't have to worry about losing data there).  If you want all one big partition, then grab GParted and use it to merge your two partitions.

In short, the reason that you can only access 32GB of your hard drive might be because the drive was improperly formatted, not because of drive failure. 

[colecampbell666]

The drive is in NTFS format.

[colecampbell666]

Most boards didn't use async bus frequencies back then, so you can only increase the FSB by 10mhz or so before you risk hard drive corruption. The AMD processors at that time had unlocked multipliers so it didn't matter, but I don't remember whether the P4s did or not.

In any case, a simple overclock isn't going to make that system any more usable for recent games.

I read something in the 3.6.8 screenshots thread about how I can make my 9550 Pro into a 9600 Pro. It is a BIOS update, would this constitute as overclocking, and will it work on my board?

EDIT: I've overclocked my card with ATITool 0.26 and the 3D view semi-freezes every few seconds. What is this?

And what is an artefact?

[castor]

The problem is, that even if you were able to overclock the 9550 to the absolute max, it would hardly give a detectable performance boost with any recent game.
Let it go...