The goal of this HowTo is to get as much performance out of the hardware as possible by overclocking it, while keeping the system as quiet as possible.
There is only one type of cpu-cooling available that makes it possible to reach very high overclock-speeds while keeping the noise down to very low levels: Water cooling.
Therefore I am going to show you how you can build and modify the hardware nescessary for building a high performance, overclocked, highly modified water-cooled system.

For this purpose I bought the following hardware:

• Epox 8KHA+ (KT266A) Motherboard
• AMD Athlon XP1800+ CPU
• 768 Mb Corsair PC2400 CAS2 DDR
• Leadtek Geforce3 Ti500 TDH
• Promise Fasttrak 100 RAID Controller
• 2 Maxtor 7.2k 60Gb Harddrives in RAID 0
• Arctic Silver II Heat-conductive paste

And designed and build a closed loop water-cool system.

In this HowTo I intend to do the following with this hardware:

• Replacing the silicon based heat-conductive paste under the heatsink of the KT266A Northbridge by Arctic Silver II.
• Modifying the motherboard, to increase the maximum V_cpu above 1.85V.
• Overclocking the FSB of the motherboard to at least 167 MHz, because at the speed a 1/5 divider is supposed to kick in, provided Epox incorporated it in the bios.
• Unlocking the CPU to be able to use all multipliers up to 12.5, as this is the maximum the Athlon XP will take.
• Overclock the CPU as high as possible while cooling it with watercooling.
• Modding all cables for better airflow inside the case.
• Overclocking the Geforce 3 Ti500 by increasing the core- and memory speed above the standard (core 240MHz, memory 500MHz).