Extreme Overclocking the Pentium 2.4C

Street Price: N/A
Date Reviewed: July 3, 2003
Article By: Joey Chao

The Processor and System:

First lets take a look at our victim. This is a boxed retail processor from Newegg that we paid for with our own money so that we could give you a feel of what the end-users are getting. The new 2.4C's run on an 800 MHz FSB and use the newer D1 Northwood stepping. Our processor's sSpec number is SL6WF from Costa Rica. Generally speaking, these processors are very good at overclocking and do not require a lot of voltage to get an amazing overclock. There have been a number of articles from other sites showing that the 2.4C's are able to get over 3 GHz using close to stock voltages with the stock cooler. This is definitely the CPU to use if you are looking to get the maximum bandwidth from your system. The reason being is that the CPU has a low multiplier of 12x. By now you know that the FSB x multiplier = CPU speed. Raising the FSB overclocks the rest of the system like the memory, resulting in overall better system performance. Since our CPU has a low multiplier and overclocks well, we should be able to raise the system bus high enough to show some nice performance.

The board that we chose to use to use for our experiment is the ABIT IC7-G. ABIT has been a trustworthy name in the world of overclocking, designing boards that cater to the enthusiast. If you remember from our review, this board has some of the highest voltages for the VCore allowing up to 1.9V. This should be the perfect candidate for our CPU overclocking adventure. Prior to this article, we have tested the board beyond 300 FSB but we were not really sure of how much further it could go. Overclocking the 2.4C with extreme cooling will give us an idea of just how well of an overclocker this motherboard is.

The rest of the system consists of two 256MB modules of Corsair TwinX to run our system in a dual channel configuration. The power supply is a PC Power and Cooling 510W with modded potentiometers so that we can tweak our voltages like the 3.3V, 5V, and 12V lines. Remember that these voltages can greatly hinder or enhance your overclocking abilities. If a line is short on juice, it might result in a lower overclock and system instabilities and at the high speeds, the entire system will be getting stressed very hard. The video card used is a GeForce MX440. We know this is not the best video card on the market but we'll explain more later on why we had to use it. The last component in our system is the hard drive which is a Western Digital 80GB Special Edition Caviar.

Now that you have an overlook of our system lets move on to the cooling and of course, the overclocking.