Not so fast

I had to back off the overclocking a little: 120Mhz FSB was a little too fast for the Celeron to be stable. Now, it's running at 117Mhz FSB, with 1.6v Vcore. Seems to be solid enough.

  $ cat /proc/cpuinfo  processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 11 model name : Intel(R) Celeron(TM) CPU 1300MHz stepping : 1 cpu MHz : 1524.039 cache size : 256 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 2 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse bogomips : 3040.87 

So, not quite so throbbingly macho, but still more than 50% faster than the PIII that was there before, and the temperatures are much more consistent: CPU temp doesn't go flailing towards the meltdown point whenever the CPU gets busy. I'm getting CPU temp around 45-50 C, and that's with the additional voltage on Vcore (1.6v vs a stock 1.5v). I could probably lower that, but tuning an overclocked machine basically consists of adjusting things until everything breaks and using the setting before that, and thats just far to much trouble.

The PIII would leap from 40-45 C at idle to 55+ under full load, and those thermal stresses did worry me: I don't want a kernel compile to start a fire in the same flat my wife and kids live in. Also, coming into the summer here, the ambient daytime temp is going to be 30+, which could conceivably push a hot processor over the 60C mark and into thermal shutdown. If I want to do some silly overclocking, I'll go back to my slockets and the P2B board. Rated Max is a PIII 550. I've got a 1Ghz running in it.

And, by the way, glxgears is giving me about 700fps through a G400, so that's ok — my screensavers are running full throttle.