Crucial Memory Overclocking Results

I felt compelled to attempt overclocking the Crucial memory first.  I was equipped with (1) 256 Meg stick of  PC133 CL2 memory and (2) 128 Meg sticks of PC 133 CL2 memory from Crucial. After installing the 256 Meg stick by Crucial, I stepped up the front side bus while running the processor at the stock 1.65v setting. The multiplier is factory locked at 6.0. Starting at 100MHz front side bus(FSB), everything ran normally. I went directly to 115MHz FSB and again, no problems. I ran some Unreal Tournament, Seti@home, and SiSoft benchmarks. No troubles. Next I went directly to the 133MHz FSB setting. I adjusted the PCI ratio to 1/4 for stability and everything was kosher. I bumped the setting up in 1MHz increments and ran resource demanding games and benchmark utilities at each step to see when the system \”coughed\”. At 136MHz front side bus (FSB) setting, the computer posted, the windows startup screen came up, and then… lockup. I rebooted at the same setting, and even tried bumping the cpu voltage up to 1.7 and 1.75 volts, but it was not to be. This troubled me because usually you\’ll start getting system errors before a hard crash, but I was getting none. This memory was standing up to everything I threw at it from Unreal Tournament, to 3DMark2001, to SiSoft Sandra\’s Memory Bench and CPU Bench and then suddenly a meager 1MHz FSB setting was the straw that broke the camel\’s pancreas… 

I decided to try the smaller sticks from Crucial (128 MB PC133 CL2). The first stick was a very good overclocker, stable at it\’s advertised 133 MHz FSB setting and staying stable right on up to a setting of 152MHz FSB.  At 153MHz FSB, I got an error message right after getting to the windows desktop. The other stick of 128MB painted a slightly uglier picture. It ran at it\’s advertised 133MHz FSB setting but at a meager 138MHz setting, I couldn\’t even run SiSoft Sandra\’s Memory Benchmark. It would report an illegal malfunction every time. Seti@home would do the same after running for about 5-10 seconds.

Mushkin Memory Overclocking Results

The Mushkin module I had on hand proved to be every bit as good as the best stick from Crucial, and then some. I started out at the advertised 133MHz FSB setting and went in 2MHz increments all the way to 150MHz, stopping and running resource taxing programs at ever step. After that I raised the FSB in 1MHz increments to 156MHz! At that setting, windows ran fine, Seti@home ran fine, SiSoft Sandra\’s CPU bench and Memory bench ran as they were supposed to, but Unreal Tournament gave an error at startup. The only way to get UT to run was to lower the FSB back down to 155MHz FSB setting. After finding the \”sweet spot\” for this memory, I ran 3DMark2001, Unreal Tournament (several online matches), Quake 2 timedemo (crusher demo), and ran Seti@home for about 24-26 hours continuously with no ill effects.

Click to see image of the Overclocking Results