Has anyone had experience with the Conroe volt mod illustrated at http://xtreview.com/addcomment.php?id=574&view=intel-conroe-voltage-pin-mod ?

I've been slowly inching up my FSB up, hoping to reach 300MHz, which seems to be about the limit for the ASRock at stock voltage. The bios doesn't allow voltage adjustment (which I knew when I bought the board -- it's a budget mobo, and not designed for overclocking), but I figure that the volt mod should allow me to crank it.

So I'm curious if anyone has had experience and possibly some advice before I attempt the mod. I had good experiences with the Athlon mods (the pencil trick etc), so I'm keen to give it a try.

"All really intelligent people should be cremated for reasons of public safety" -- The Amazing Screw-On Head

paul wrote The Conroes have plenty of overhead. 300 fsb is a no-brainer for them, I'm running close stock vcore on my Gigabyte S3 and DS3's @ 400 -430 fsb.

Okay, so the mod may not help me much. I suppose it can't hurt to try.

I hate to tell you this, but the extra $40 or so on a better mobo would have let you really crank that cpu. Not familiar with that mobo, but if it's the 945 chipset,  it's severely limited in it's overclockability. We seem to think it's a memory controller issue, as memory just refuses to run higher bus speeds.

I agree, Paul, and don't mind hearing that from you. But there's a catch: It's only $40 if you already have DDR2 and a PCI-E card.  I don't, and won't be able to afford them for a while, so I opted for a mobo that would let me use my old RAM and AGP card. That way I'm in Conroe Country, enjoying a healthy boost to my RAC, even if I can't overclock it to its full potential.

I do plan to buy a better board down the road and push that puppy. In the meantime I thought I'd explore ways to get the most out of what I have. It's possible that I've reached the limit. That's fine ... I didn't think I'd be able to overclock at all, to be honest.

"All really intelligent people should be cremated for reasons of public safety" -- The Amazing Screw-On Head

paul wrote Apologies, I forgot that was the main reason for going with that mobo, to reuse older hardware. I stand corrected...

Hey, no worries, Paul. :)

The 775Dual-VSTA is a nifty bit of engineering. It's stable and performs well. And although it's inexpensive, it has really good 7.1 onboard sound, and even an HDMI audio connector. Product page: http://www.asrock.com/product/775Dual-VSTA.htm. I'd recommend it to anyone looking to extend the life their components.

"All really intelligent people should be cremated for reasons of public safety" -- The Amazing Screw-On Head