Intel Celeron 566 (2/7)

Overclocking Trouble

The lack of an 8,5 multiplier setting on BX boards doesn't pose a problem. The Celeron ignores the boards multiplier setting and uses its own. Without a BIOS update, the Celeron is recognized as a Pentium III Coppermine (E) with no adverse effects on performance. It works as advertised - that is, until you switch to a 100MHz FSB.

On my Tekram P6BX-A it would barely run for 25 seconds at 850 MHz before the system locked up. Increasing the voltage to 1,85V only added a few seconds to the time before lock-up. Undaunted I tried the same procedure in an ASUS P3B-F, only to find that the board refused to even POST at the 8,5x setting. It seems the mainboard tries to identify the CPU during initialization (soft jumpering), but fails right at the beginning and locks up, even before the video-card's bios information is displayed. Bumping up the core voltage to 1,95V had no effect whatsoever. When set to run at 566MHz, neither of the boards had any problems with the chip.

I'd almost come to terms with the fact that not every Celeron 566 is destined to reach 850MHz when I (and some others in our IRC channel) noticed that most of the reviews that had successfully overclocked the Celeron used boards by Abit. This company has built a reputation as the overclocker's best friend, and I thought "If they can't do it, it probably doesn't work". So I went out, got myself an Abit BE6-II and tried again. Using Abit's Softmenu BIOS, you can adjust the FSB in 1 MHz increments, allowing speeds like 92 MHz. And to my great surprise, the Celeron worked beautifully at this setting, reaching 782 MHz at normal core voltage. Once I started increasing the FSB speed beyond that, I encountered sporadic crashes. Tweaking the core voltage to 1,8v remedied this quite nicely, and all benchmarks ran smoothly and completed at speeds up to 850 MHz without further incident. That ranks as stable in my book! This board / CPU combination is "go" for overclocking!

The overclocker’s secret weapon!? Abit must be doing something different.

As incredible as it sounds, Abit's was the only mainboard in which our overclocked Celeron would work at 100MHz FSB, even though the boards by ASUS and Tekram are built around the same BX chipset. Has Abit secretly found a way to bend the rules of physics? Well, what counts is the end result, and that is quite satisfactory! Seems that Abit's overclocking reputation is quite justified....

Copyright: 16.06.2000 (Tanslation by Benjamin Kraft)-   RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand
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