Extreme Overclocking the Pentium 2.4C

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

Prometeia Setup and Results:

The first cooler we decided to test out was the Prometeia from Chip-Con. This is an evaporative phase change cooler. For more information on how these types of coolers work, please read this review of the VapoChill by Jason, where he gives a little insight on what phase change cooling really is.

The Prometeia is easy to setup and can be used 24/7. It has a very clever design which prevents condensation, allowing it to be used all the time without having to worry about condensation killing the system. You can pick up a Prometeia for about $500 for just the bottom unit. Our unit can get as cold as -42C using some optimized settings. Keep in mind that these temperatures are only relating to the evaporator head. The actual CPU temps will not be that cold.

We slapped the Prometeia on our system and went straight into the overclocking. Looking in the BIOS, our CPU temps were showing -22C which is a very good sign. We have a general idea of how well these CPUs overclock so we set our starting point at 300 FSB, which would put our CPU at 3.6GHz. Using the stock voltage of 1.525V, the system was stable at 3.6GHz. The memory divider that we used was the 3:2 because it takes the memory out of play so we could focus on the CPU.

From 300FSB we started overclocking in 5 MHz increments on the FSB. Originally we had started testing with a Radeon 9700 Pro. The system would crash at any FSB over 300+. This was a strange issue considering the system was running perfectly stable at 300. The error was reading that something was wrong with the video card. After hours of frustration, we finally figured out what it was. The AGP/PCI ratio over 300 MHz FSB automatically locks at 66/33. Apparently it doesn't do that great of a job locking because in past experiences we have had issues with our 9700 Pro when the AGP speed is too high, which in the case was the issue. Switching the card out to our MX440 solved all the issues and we could continue overclocking.

The highest stable speed we could reach with our 2.4C was 3.8GHz. We could even post at 4GHz but getting into windows was impossible. The CPU temperatures were reading around -9C using 1.7V. This is a pretty good overclock since we are 1.4GHz over the stock speed. The benchmarks showed us some really good results and you can see how much of a difference the higher FSB makes. The memory scores are very high even though were are not even running the memory that fast.