Overclocking kt133a to 150mhz+

[JJSuperman]

I was thinking that instead of getting a DDR board I could just try overclocking a KT133a board to 150+ mhz. The latest Anandtech roundup talked about getting a board over 160. My question is to you folks who own KT133a boards...

Can the board be run that high safely? I ran my BX board that high but burned up my hard drive. Will this be a problem with the KT133a?

Also, what kind of performance could I expect from a 155mhz bus? Near DDR levels?

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Boonesmi]

hard drives are on the pci bus, the pci bus is run as a fraction of the fsb, 1/3rd on a 100mhz bus or 1/4 on a 133mhz bus both mean the pci runs at around 33mhz if you run your fsb at 150mhz then the pci will be 1/4th or 37.5mhz just make sure your pci devices can take 37.5mhz and you should be fine.

 

[OCnMan]

There are too many variables involved to answer your question directly. So, I will answer with an example.

I run an Iwill KK266 with an Athlon 1000 at 1500MHZ. This is a killer mobo and I got lucky with a great Athlon 1GIG that wanted to ROCK!. Anyway, the system runs stable at 150FSB*10, with the RAM at Cas2 and fastest setings. I have also run it at 158FSB*9.5 for 1501MHZ. I use ToniCom PC-166 RAM.
I had stability problems at 158FSB, I am pretty sure this was due to the RAM, as I have more than adequate northbridge cooling and this motherboard is known for going much higher. There are very few motherboards that can do 150MHZ stable, much less 160+, but I feel that the Iwill is no doublt one of them.
There are SO many variables involved, but I will attempt to address your questions as well as I can:
1: A decent KT133A board can easily be run at 150+ safely.
2: At even these levels of FSB, the RAM timings are more important than ultimate FSB. For Instance, My system has better memory benchmarks at 150FSB with settings of Cas2 and the fastest bios RAM settings than at 158FSB at Cas3 with the slowest settings (all my ToniCom could muster).
Conclusion: If you already have some good PC-133 or better RAM around, grab and Iwill or Asus mobo and party on, if you are starting over or fresh, just go and do the DDR thing.
You can, with a lot of tweaking, DDR levels of performance with a KT133A board and good RAM, but if possible, why not just do the DDR?
I love my Iwill KT133A system, but if I were starting from scratch, I'd probably go DDR.
OCnMan

 

[JJSuperman]

If both DDR and KT133a systems perform the same but the KT133a is $50-100 dollars cheaper for the board and 256mb of ram, then why not go for the KT133a? Could you explain a little better the benefits of DDR because it seems to me that for equal performance I should go with the cheaper one.

 

[Fearless]

Hi

Funny enough ive been cranking up the fsb on my kt7a today with the I/O set to 3.6v i got i fsb of 158mhz, at This speed sandra benches are: 669mb/s ALU 723mb/s FPU.This is with cas 2,turbo,etc

Im well pleased before messin with the I/O max fsb was 150mhz.

cya

 

[Boonesmi]

jjsuperman:

even though kt133a boards are almost as fast as new ddr board it doesnt mean it will stay that way. most current apps dont require alot of memory bandwidth and current thunderbirds/durons dont require alot either

athlon4 is a little more bandwidth hungry (still nothing like the pent4) and the next generations of amd chips will need even more

also next generation apps will be more bandwidth hungry.

so even though today comparing a kt133a with a amd760 doesnt show much difference, but a year from now the same two setups with palominos running new apps might be a whole dif story.

 

[JJSuperman]

Will the new palimino's be supported by the current DDR boards? Or will I have to buy a new board for the new processors?

 

[Caper]

I have Epox 8K7A DDR and it supports Palomino.
About those other DDR boards...I don´t really know but I suppose they do.

 

[Boonesmi]

yes most current socketA boards will support the palomino