Introduction:

If you got lousy cooling or a bad overclocking P4, your memory is probably not maxed out using the default 4:5 front size bus / memory divider on an 845PE board. Luckely, you can trick your motherboard into thinking it's actually a 400FSB processor, making the 3:4 divider available in your BIOS.

Test rig: Gigabyte 845PE, Intel 2.4B (533FSB, stock cooler), 512mb Corsair XMS PC3500

Tools needed:

• fine brush


• needle


• silver (or other conductive) paint

Make the 3:4 divider available in 5 steps:

1. remove your p4 out of the mobo


2. flip it, look at the backside and locate the 2 pins you've got to connect.




3. dip your fine brush in conductive paint, and paint the gap between the 2 pins.




4. Use your needle to remove any conductive paint that's not between the two pins.


5. Insert it back into your mobo

Here you can see step 2 through 4 in action:


Download/Full Screen - click here

Viola, now your 533 Proc will be recognized as a 400FSB one. Upon first boot, FSB will probably be reduced from 133 to 100mhz.



Previously having a 4:5 divider, a 3:4 is now available. A low 150FSB now results in a nice 200mhz (400ddr) memory speed.



On my testrig, this mod had the following effect:
Before: P4 2.4B at 155FSB and (4:5) 194mhz mem.
After: P4 2.4B at 155FSB and (3:4) 207mhz mem.

Hope this helps you getting a little more power out of your P4. :^) Thanks to Niko@xtreme for pointing out which pins to connect!

written by richba5tard

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