i have a friend who has just bought a XP2500+ and a Zalman 7000a CU
he can overclock it 3200+ speeds (200*12) but its not stable - ive told him to put the voltages up - but he isnt willing to risk his processor - so he want conformation of what voltages he should be using from someone who has got it stable at that speeds
i perswaded him up 0.05 of a volt and that got it stable for longer but he chickened out after that
thoughts please people
thanks

Steg

Vcore is 1.5v for AMD's 1.3u cores, but you can safely go to 1.75v. I recommend 1.65v as very safe, and I personally wouldn't go much above that, as the performance gains will be minimal. Do not go above 1.85v under any circumstances as the risk of damaging the cpu is too great. I overclocked my 1700+ to (200*11.5) @ 1.65v without problem.

The VCore for a 2500+ is 1.65 not 1.5 ( 1.5 is only for the 0.13 1700+ ).

Not all CPUs will perform the same when it comes to overclocking. Some can be very stable without voltage adjustment, others need a lot.

Tell him to try it with 0.05 at a time. Set it in the BIOS, reboot & run some sort of CPU intensive task to see if it's stable ( SETI@Home comes to mind ). It's always good to run a Health Monitoring program at the same time to keep an eye on the CPU temps.

There is also the fact that some chips die over a certain amount of time, not straight away. You can be running an OCed chip for months & start having stability problems that you can no longer resolve, even at stock speeds. OCing is a very risky business & trying it means you're willing to loose your purchased CPU ( but then again, that's never stopped us from doing it before ).

the vcore on a 2500+ is indeed 1.65v - we use MBM5.3 and 3dmark2001SE as a suitably intensive task
so i assume its safe @ 1.75 mayb 1.8 - it always worth a try - *HOPES IT DOESNT MELT*
at stock volts (1.65) it gets as far as the start of test 2, at (1.7) test 7 before quitting to desktop - so now its time to try 1.5
thanks

Steg

1.8V should be OK. It should die about the time it's obsolete.

this link should help