I'm trying the overclock route. Bought a Celeron300A chip and a new Asus P2B mobo. Runs great at 300MHz. However, I get page faults when I run at 450MHz. I think it might need more voltage but this mobo does not offer any way to juice it up. I've tried different pc100 memory chips, get the same page fault error. Any suggestions (yeah, I'm thinking about getting an Abit mobo).

Over clocking a CPU is an art form or a sport or something. There are no hard and fast rules. One thing that is for sure, a Celery will run at 75mhz, no prob. Not the "expert" performance you were hoping for, but very stable. That would be the normal multiplyer at 75mhz, or 375mhz. No extra fans or other wierdness required. If you want to "seriously" over clock check out the newsgroup: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus Any damage you may have from going that route is your own damn fault.

Kepp it cool, suggest dual fan heatsink like a Alpha, add a case fan, use heatsink compound and check these sites: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/celeron_oc/ http://www.processor.org/ http://www.overclockers.com/

There is a way to change the core voltage on an ASUS P2B. You have to solder in a jumper grid, though. If you look at the motherboard over by the AGP slot there are some unused solder connections labeled VID0. This is where you have to set up your voltage selection jumpers. Don't do it yet. You need more info. I'll see if I can dig it up for ya. After the mod you will be able to select between 2.0, 2.1, 2.3 and maybe 2.5 (i think)

OK, here's how to solder in the Voltage select jumpers and also how to enable SoftMenu BIOS on an ASUS P2B. A guy from Germany named Thomas Schuster (thomas@ingsu.mk.uunet.de) sent this to me. If you have any questions, he seems pretty happy to help... Oh, BTW, you can get the 1009 BIOS from ASUS at www.asus.com.tw And, don't try this unless you are completely competent in soldering. Good luck! ----- First: you don't need a BIOS upgrade, or a patch for the BIOS. What you need is to solder some additional jumpers and remove two resistors. Second: this works ONLY with board revisions of 1.10 and above. Both, VCore and SoftMenu, work with the standard BIOS 1009. The VCore can manually be changed by adding and setting some jumpers on the Board, the SoftMenu can be enabled by adding another jumper. SoftMenu: Have a look on your board. If you have it laying in front of you (the external connectors to the left, ISA slots to the bottom, DIMM sockets to the right), then you find on the right side, just above the first ISA-slot, one big, black chip from the chipset. Now, on the left side of this chip, exactly in the middle, there are 3 pads for a jumper, which is marked with "JEN", and mostly the middle pin and the right pin are connected via a bridge (but must not be, I saw some without this connection). If you now remove that bridge and connect the middle pin with the left pin, you can enable the SoftMenu. Solder in a 3-pin jumper, and set the jumper to the left position; then after REMOVING ALL BF- AND FS-JUMPERS (those needed to set FSB and multiplier manually, eight pieces together) and a reboot you will find in your BIOS two new options, the option of setting the multiplier between 2.0x and 8.0x, and the option to set the FSB between 50 (which is actually 124!), 66, 75, 83 and 100 MHz. With newer CPU's, the multiplier is of course not interesting (while fixed), and if you want to overclock a CPU with more than 100MHz FSB, then this is not possible via the BIOS. That's also the reason why you should not only solder the left pins; setting a jumper is much better! Set it back to the right position, and the SoftMenu is gone... and you need to set back all the BF- and FS-jumpers again. I'm at the moment trying to implement some more possibilities in the BIOS to get all the possible frequencies between 66 and 150 MHz, but it is not easy. VCore: Enabling the VCore is a more difficult thing. Have again a look on your board, laying to you the same way. Directly above the connector for the CPU-thermistor "JTCPU", you find some pads for additional jumpers called "VID4" - "VID0", 5 x 3-pin. Now, to get the possibility to set the VCore manually (this goes around the standard way by reading the CPU's pins for the default), you have to add these 5 jumpers (or some of them), and remove two resistors. Remove the resistors first; they are directly at the VID-jumpers. One is the resistor directly above named "R30A", the other is a little 4-resistor-network directly on the left, called "RN99" (on my board and some others the R30A was missing before the modification, maybe it is on some boards and on some not because for some friends of mine I had to remove it, same revision 1.10). Now, solder in the 5 jumpers (to read the CPU's default you need them all!) or minimum the ones you need (I did mostly only two, VID0 and VID1 because the VCore range is then from 2.1 to 2.3 volts, that should be enough), and you can set the VCore with these jumpers: Setting all 5 jumpers to 1-2 results in reading the CPU's default of normally 2.0 volt. Now, if you want to change the VCore, REMOVE THEM ALL and: Setting ONLY the bottom jumper VID0 to 2-3 gives you 2.1 volt, setting ONLY VID1 to 2-3 gives you 2.1 volt, setting BOTH of them to 2-3 gives 2.3 volt, etc. You can control the VCore in the BIOS, it will display you the actual rate. Don't panic when trying 2.2 or more: the board's health monitor will read the VCore while booting, and you get an error message when it is above 2.1 volt; so if you want go higher than 2.1 volts, you have to disable the VCore monitoring in the BIOS. I did that modification now several times (everybody wants to have it ;-)), and they all work perfect. But please: if you want to do this, be very careful with the soldering! Remember that the board is a multilayer PCB, and you should do it only when you are experienced in soldering thin structures and have the right equipment! If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to mail me! Greetings from Germany! Thomas