FSB - 100 ~vs~ 133?

SantaHoe

My motherboard has a nice little jumper that lets me up the FSB to 133MHz, at the moment I'm running @ 100MHz FSB... what I'm wondering is wether it's worth joining my L1 bridges and lowering the multiplier just for the sake of having the higher FSB.
And would my Duron-800 be happy running on a 133 fsb in the first place?

Also, are there any decent alternatives to the pencil for joining the L1 bridges?
I've heard of people using pens with special conductive ink, and even someone using a bog-standard marker.
I don't fancy having to re-join them every few weeks/months, sounds like a right pain in the muff.

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CPU: Duron 800MHz (non-o/c'ed)
Mobo: Legend Kinetiz 7t/7b/7e (via chipset)
RAM: 196MB PC133 SDRAM

chernobyl

the performance jump is so marginal, so no.
FSB goes up, so does PCI, can your PCI gear handle a 33MHZ jump?
only one way to find out.
]

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Ashley Lyn Cafagna

_CreeD_

Conductive pens are the handiest.

Also AMD cpus tend to be very overclockable. Ive never seen one do less than 10% extra, so if you're going to go as far as modifying it you may aswell try.
The extra FSB speed will improve performance on bandwidth restricted apps, TFC probably won't show you too much of an improvement but newer games should.
Any apps that deal with large files (Eg. Mpeg4 compressors, LArge wave files etc.) will also appreciate the increase.

As Chernobyl said you will also be overclocking your PCI (1/3) and AGP (1/2) buses, his dividers were a little low though. Some motherboards have options to let you set 133 with a 1/4 PCI divider which will keep it at 33Mhz. If not you will be running a 44Mhz PCI and 88Mhz AGP bus. Ive done this before on an older system with a Voodoo3 and it was fine - but not all hardware is happy to run at that speed. IT's hit and miss really.

Spoonman

Depends on your mobo chipset, is it Apollo Pro133/133A, the latter (133A) will easily allow you to overclock cpu and memory to suit 133 bus.

Gains of upto 25% in performance like gerry said arent uncommon by overclocking your fsb its by no means a marginal gain. Once its the 133A chipset your not pushing up your pci, agp etc.

Personally I have a duron 800 / abit kt7a and it runs perfect at 133x7.5 (1Ghz), but you should also need to up your core voltage to keep it stable if overclocked.

Gerry

Erm, any board which will officialy run at 133mhz will have a 1/4 pci divider. Some early bx boards which were well capable of running 133mhz bus, lacked a 1/4 pci divider, but this was a problem with the clock generator on the board, not the chipset. So your board should automatically set itself to 1/4 at 133mhz, there might also be an option in the bios.

Your chipset also has a 1/2 agp divider, so both your pci and agp buses will be running at spec.

It is worth having a higher fsb. The motherboard, and in particular the memory bandwidth is the bottleneck in modern systems. The duron (or any chip) will run on any fsb, it does not care, as long as the motherboard can give it stable signals at that fsb.

As for the performance increase being marginal, well I wouldn't say that, without substantial proof to back it up.
As creed says, older games will not be helped much, but newer games thrive on high memory bandwidth.

For example, I benchmarked my machine, a p3 600 @ 960 ( 160 fsb ) against a p3 850 @ 954 ( 112 fsb ). The 160 fsb machine was 25% faster in quake3, hardly marginal?

Maplin have conductive ink, or you can use windscreen demister repair kit from any decent car accessory shop.

SantaHoe

Thanks for the advise guys, I might just head into town and pick up some of that delicious conductive ink, as the four different pencils I've tried haven't worked (they had no markings to indicate H or B, so I don't know what they were ).

Is the conductive ink removable?
/me is scared of making a boo-boo and destroying his duron.
And what do I ask for?
Just - "er, could I get a conductive ink pen there when you're ready?"
Or would I get a funny look?

Stephen

Hehehe, I remember santa frying his k6-2 450

SantaHoe

Yes, but I have a new 450MHz keyring now