Why can I only raise my fsb to 137?

Question

I have a 6380 with a 1400 thunderbird, it runs well but I ve seen at 3dmarks score comparison that my cpu gets beaten by a lot of equivalent processors apparantly because they run at a fsb which is much higher than mine....I can only raise it to 137 before the system crashes.
Should I get a new motherboard?
PS: I know what FSB stands for but what it is or what it does I have no clue about.

Answer 1

Quote
Originally posted by Danielsan
PS: I know what FSB stands for but what it is or what it does I have no clue about.
Front Side Bus is the RF oscilator (clock) frequency applied to the CPU. If the CPU has an FSB of 100Mhz and it has a multiplier of 10 then the internal workings of the CPU will be running at 1Ghz. If you increase the FSB to 133Mhz still with the multiplier at 10 then it wil be running at 1.33Ghz. You can also change the multiplier on some CPUs to get even bigger changes in speed. BUT as slipkid said it all comes at a price, HEAT and instability. It also speeds up the death of the CPU and/or RAM if you over clock. Some people suggest the increase in voltage of the DDR modules to improve stability. It works but again reduces the life of the RAM.
If you want more speed the best suggestion is to up the type of CPU you have.
Remember that if you increase the FSB by 5Mhz with a multiplier of 10 then you only have an increase of 50Mhz in CPU speed and you will never see that with the naked eye.