I was just browsing under the topic of 'overclocking' as many seem to be doing nowadays and hit this room. I have just purchased an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ through resentment of the high purchase prices of the 3200+ and other high range AMD products. With my very limited knowledge on the subject it seems apparent that the marked up products we buy nowadays are simply labelled by the manufacturer in relation to there own financial gains and therefore what is sitting in my PC as a 2500+ could potentially mirror someone elses 2600+. Which I find highly irresponsible and misleading. I got myself the 2500+ as I understand it is a great processor to start an overclocking project from. However I have no real idea how to go about this. From reading, I understand that the boxed heatsink is as expected not sufficient for OC. I have sufficient exhaust and intake cooling fans on my PC, front, back, side and top even but what would be the next steps I need to take to OC my PC? Currently I am running with a potentially dated Mother board (K7AMA from Elite) and PC2100 ram. What would be the essential alterations I need to make to my system in order to run a 2500+ at 3200+ speeds? Also, from my limited experience here, how easy is it to alter this once the alterations have been made? Would I need to manually modify the hardware or are there simple software modifications to make? Would I need to cool anything other than the CPU? Say for example the Ram? Apologies for my ignorance.

Barium Titanate :-), sorry, couldn't help myself. Well, if your board has AGP/PCI lock and CPU ratio selections in BIOS, lock AGP/PCI at 66/33, select CPU ratio at 3:2. I'll bet your 2500+ is multi locked at 11x, so the only thing you can do is to up the FSB. The CPU is not a problem, so it's up to your mobo and your RAM. I'd try to get FSB from 133 to 166 first (in small step at a time) then see if can do more from there. Oh well, maybe your mobo even does not support Barton chips. Then you have to get a new mobo. If it does, then the thing holding you back is likely the RAM.

"With my very limited knowledge on the subject it seems apparent that the marked up products we buy nowadays are simply labelled by the manufacturer in relation to there own financial gains and therefore what is sitting in my PC as a 2500+ could potentially mirror someone elses 2600+. Which I find highly irresponsible and misleading" It works like this. Say you want to sell stick deodorants and customers want a selection of sizes, 0.5oz, 1oz, 2oz, and 3oz. Your engineers discover that the cheapest way to deliver this range of products to market is to make nothing but 3oz sticks, but to put a different push mechanism in each so that the 0.5oz stick only pushes up an inch then stops, the 1 oz pushes up 2 inches then stops, etc. This might seem dumb because you're wasting potential but if its the cheapest way to do it, then that's what you do. CPU chips are the same way. You can't hold it against the manufacturer for producing nothing but great chips and then underclocking most of them since that's what the public wants. That is why overclocking should really be called rightclocking, and is less dangerous than most people think. Your mobo does not support the 2500+. http://www.ecsusa.com/support/table_amd.html To turn a 2500+ into a 3200+ you need a mobo that will do 200fsb. Any nforce2 board will do that. Don't get one that does not allow vcore adjustments, because its possible you'll need a small bump there, but not likely. The stock sink is fine if that's all you're doing.

to fully utilize that overclock, make sure that new motherboard supports PC3200 ( 400 mhz ) memory to run in sync with your cpu's FSB @ 200 ( 400 DDR ) Asus A7N8X Deluxe Abit NF7-s<-------my board,great 2500+ overclocker Gigabyte GA7N400 MSI K7N2-Delta-L

"as a 2500+ could potentially mirror someone elses 2600+. Which I find highly irresponsible and misleading" Just to add to Johnoh's comment. The label laws in USA, if a 12 fl oz Coke is 14 fl oz, it is perfectly legal. On the other hand, if the 12 fl oz Coke only has 11.9 fl oz, it is illegal and subjected to fine on each occurance. Figure that out yourself. Unless, you are not living in the U.S., in that case consult your local government agency regarding consumer product label regulations.

Thanx for all the responses. What would be a good motherboard for what I want to do? Any suggestions?

This is one of the fastest socket A boards on the market, super overclockable too. http://www.leadtek.com/motherboard/winfast_k7ncr18dm_1.html I don't suffer from insanity, I embrace it.