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Written by Tuan "Solace" Nguyen
Thursday, June 21, 2001
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Page 2 of 4 Operation Time
NOTE: At the time of picture taking, I was only with an Intel DB850 motherboard. I’m currently out of the country, writing this article using an Asus P4T motherboard and so you won’t see the pretty pictures of it here. All the tweaking is done with the P4T.
First we
crack open the case to the box. Our system came with a really good heatsink but its fan isn’t powerful at all. A slow fan with low air output isn’t all that was hampering our system from supreme optimization. A quick glance at the heatsink after removing it also gave us telltale signs that we needed to tweak the cooling solution as well.
Although the base is copper, the heatsink compound looked like it wasn’t doing a very good job at all. We needed a better solution. The first thermal compound that came to mind was Arctic Silver 2.
Above you see the original Pentium 4 that shipped with the box after the heatsink was removed. Obviously it could have used better heatsink compound than what was already applied. I proceeded to remove the existing chip and replace it with the new processor. Below is a picture of the old processor (top) and the new shiny one (below).
Once the processor is taken out of the box, apply the thermal compound to it before doing anything. Avoid touching the heat plate on the processor because the oil from your fingers insulates heat and don’t allow the thermal compound to efficiently come in contact with the plate.
Above you see the Arctic Silver smoothly applied and the processor seated in its socket.
Instead of using the default, lower CFM fan that came with the stock heatsink, I installed a high CFM Delta 60mm fan on the heatsink instead. The stock Pentium 4 heatsink (that shipped with the system) is actually really good and has a large copper base so I figured I’d pair up a good heatsink with an equally good fan. You’ll notice that the fan is pulling air away from the heatsink and there is tape around the top half of the heatsink. This method is the forced-air method I’ve been talking about in some of my other articles and reviews.
I also placed some Arctic Silver between the north bridge and the heatsink that sits atop. This should keep things cool as the northbridge is practically a Pentium 3 flip chip and runs quite hot.
Remember, those pictures do not reflect the Asus P4T motherboard I used to overclock the processor.
Overclocking
Here’s where the fun begins. The Intel D850GB doesn’t have settings for FSB nor does it have settings for multiplier settings. Thus, we resort to using an enthusiast targeted board like the Asus P4T. You can adjust both FSB and multiplier speeds from inside the P4T’s Advanced BIOS settings.
After a while of trial run of testing different FSB and multiplier settings, I managed to settle on a stable overclock of 2.04GHz (117MHz FSB * 17.5X multiplier). For a processor with deep pipelines like the Pentium 4, an overclock of over 300MHz isn’t spectacular, but reaching 2GHz is definitely something to see. Before processors broke the 1GHz barrier a while back, reaching 1GHz took a very, very long time. In light of this, Intel will have an official 2GHz processor sometime in the autumn.
As processor speeds rise higher and higher, fabricating multi-gigahertz processors becomes easier. What I mean by easier is that speeds are reached much easier. Actually fabricating the processor however, is another issue. Intel and AMD will have to research better methods to manufacture processors if they want to continue pushing the envelope.
All in all, the Pentium 4 overclocks quite nicely no matter what speed grade you have. Let’s see how it performs.
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