Overclocking

cooperguy

From what iv figured out this is means increasing the speed of your cpu. Im just wondering how you go about it, im not going to be doing it myself cause mines working well for me at the moment (3.4GHz) im just interested in how you do it.

Khannie

Google is your friend. It depends on your processor (P4 in your case), your heatsink, the thermal paste, your motherboard, etc. etc.

Worth the read for the performance boost usually. Also gives you a small understanding of how processors work.

SouperComputer

Well to put it simply, if you have a PC from a major manufacturer such as Dell, HP\Compaq etc then you will be unable to overclock as the motherboards generally have no provision to do so.

You will need a decent board from a company such as DFI, Abit, ASUS etc that allows you to adjust certain paramaters such as the FSB and Multiplier speed, voltage going to the CPU (add voltage to try to clock higher, but risk more heat and permanent damage)

You will also need a good CPU cooler from Zalaman or thermaright.

To get the maximum out of your overclock, you will need decent RAM also. If you experience insability, you may have to get a quality PSU from fortron, seasonic or Bequiet.

Overclocking works becuase of the way the yield of a wafer works. Some chips come off a wafer and are shipped as say, 3.0Ghz, but they way be well capeable of 3.6 or even more. Converesly some chips have less overhead available.

Ill give my current machine as an example. It is an extreme and very rare one too!

Its an old Gigabyte motherboard that I pulled from a CCTV system, with seemingly no provision for overclocking. I cant increace the voltage for example. It supports 400 and 533 FSB's (remember FSBx Chip multiplier = Chip Speed).

I picked up an 1.8Ghz P4, 400FSB chip for €20 here. It runs at a nice low, 1.5V

The FSB on the chip is 400mhz, so the multiplier is 4.5. This is locked on my chip and cannot be changed.

By manually selecting an FSB of 600Mhz, I get a clock speed of 2.7Ghz, not bad for €20

Its been running stable for about 6months like this now.

Increacing the FSB is the easiest way to start overclocking, but it must be done in incremental steps to avoid damage to your motherboard or chip


Have a look at the posts on the tweaking/modding forum for more info

L31mr0d

SouperComputer wrote:

Well to put it simply, if you have a PC from a major manufacturer such as Dell, HP\Compaq etc then you will be unable to overclock as the motherboards generally have no provision to do so.

Thats not necessarily true, there is usually always someone out there whos written a hacked version of your BIOS that unlocks all the overclocking utilities. Just flash your BIOS if the options aren't available, and then get overclocking. You might not see amazing results with a system that wasn't built to be OC'd. But it will be a good stepping stone.

This particular thread has been a great help to me:
Help with Overclocking

SouperComputer

L31mr0d wrote:

Thats not necessarily true, there is usually always someone out there whos written a hacked version of your BIOS that unlocks all the overclocking utilities. Just flash your BIOS if the options aren't available, and then get overclocking. You might not see amazing results with a system that wasn't built to be OC'd. But it will be a good stepping stone.

This particular thread has been a great help to me:
Help with Overclocking

Thats why I said generally. Also, a lot of them have no provision for a PCI lock, meaning possible data loss for someone new to the scene.


You can go to the trouble to chaging clocks too if you want to go crazy.