I have an ABIT BH7 and a P4 2.4ghz, 1GB ram, and a geforce4 ti4200 (old i know) gfx card. My system is able to overclock to 3.0 ghz i believe, I'd like to know if I should or shouldn't O/C because I have never done it on this system. Would I notice a big difference?

If you want to burn up components and can afford replacements, heck yeah, do it!

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What it 'can do' and what it will actually do are 2 different animals. Start slow, bring it up in steps, monitor your tempature and test for stability by running your favorite game etc.

Try to cut off the stepping up when yout temp gets around 50c or if you notice weird artifacts, drop it back to default.

Do you notice a difference.... Yes !
Can you actaully do damage... Yes !
Is it worth the risk....... see below !
Do you have money......... ??? !

Why cant we put questions here?

Overclocking the P4 is a fairly safe procedure, you CANNOT burn the processor because of the built-in thermal protection. Secondly going from 2.4GHz to 3.0Ghz is a 25% increase in clock speed and that is a significant change.

However a 25% clock change doesn't automatically translate to a 25% productivity boost, it all depends on the tasks involved, let's face it, the CPU idle's for most of its lifetime in PC's anyway. So long as you can @ 3Ghz run without instability or unbearable temps GO for it.

My sig is on sabbatical.

yeah i would go for it to. just make sure it runs stable at the 3ghz mark. also get some good cooling for your case, and your cpu. maybe your north bridge to.

AMD Athlon XP 2800
PC2700 512mb
Geforce fx 5200 oc'ed
Gigabyte GA-7S748-L
Windows XP Professional With service pack 2
400 watt PSU
48x dvdrom
120G 7200rpm hard disk
3MB cable

OCing the cpu only usually doesn't gain
that much more power unless you do it to a
very high rate. 25% is quite high but
depending on the application running it
will only gain something aroun 10% +/-5% I
guess.
If you're able to raise the whole system
including the Ram that will bring a nice
boost on he speed. The problem with that is
that you need fast enough Ram to do that.
If you already have PC2700 (333MHz) Ram
installed there's a good chance to get your
whole system up to 166MHz FSB from the
original 133MHz FSB of the P4 2,4GHz but
using PC2100 (266MHz) Ram will not work
that way!

Just do it in small steps and you need to
keep an eyes on the PCI clock. Using PCI
divider or even better a PCI lock in the
bios you should try to keep it as close to
33,33MHz as possible and above 37,5MHz you
surely run into trouble with pci add-on
card and internal pci components in your
board!

As was already written keep a very close
eye on the cpu temperature!

That motherboard will support the p4 2.4ghz 800 fsb unofficially. If that's your current chip, you really have a nice overclocker. If not, you will not get much more than 3 ghz if that.
Be-ware, overclocking can get into the blood!
As long as temps are good below 45c load, you should be fine.
regards: ken (p4clocker)