A64 Turion fun

While roaming for a cheap Core Duo chip to upgrade my HTPC, I stumbled upon AMD's - low power - Turion. I was very happy with my Pentium M Celeron 1.4Ghz dothan, but it's nearly impossible to find a PCIX motherboard for the pentium m, and i wanted to buy a new videocard.

The Turion produces equal amount of heat (25 watts), is cheaper (the MT-30 costed me 150 euros) and best of all, it fits a cheap s754 motherboard, which is widely avaible and offers PCIX.

Has anyone got experience overclocking the Turion? I've got a MT-30 (1.6Ghz, 25W, 1mb l2) and Asus NF4 motherboard, how high should i be able to overclock it?

Does anyone know whether the soon-to-be-released A64 X2 will be s754 too?

like normally with amd chips, it is pretty easy to overclock, however overclocking isn't only just placing different settings into your BiOs, it has different points in it to stay aware off.

To be secure with amd overclock settings you shouldn't go over 125% of the fabric settings.

If you wish to go further with the clock settings, make sure you don't overheat you system, the further you go, the more heat you will produce.

Your BiOs would allow you to check the heat of you cpu and memory at all time, make sure you check this after every reboot you do<needed to check if the clock settings are stable>.

Hint: Don't clock more then 5% at the time.

Hint2: While checking if the system is stable, keep it running windows xp/vista or linux for about 10 minutes, if possible within that time trow in a heavy game to max out your usage.

hope this would give a nice idea about it.

rb knows the basics alright

Thanks anyway, maybe someone will find that useful.

And welcome to the forum!

Yeah, welcome!

I have played a bit with my Turion, and ended up at 250 HTT (1.6 @ 2.0Ghz). It worked fine for a few weeks, but with cooling set to minimal and the extremely hot wheather of 2 weeks back, it locked up twice.

I don't think it was due to the processor (55C), but rather the mainboard chipset (60C).

I'm back to default now. 1.6Ghz is not much for playing games, but it's more than enough for HTPC purposes.

If it's a workstation, i fully agree. It's also one of the reason why i develop on laptops, they don't allow me to overclock it.

Some processors can be very stable when overclocked, but they're rather rare. My XP1700+ has been running at 2Ghz since since day 1, and has _never ever_ locked up. That's a 30%, fully stable overclock.

My computer at work:

(clickable)