Overclocking - Step By Step Guide
Nov 21 '00
“Deep in the woods deep dark laughter can be heard above the howl of wolves. I’ve done it! It Lives! It Lives! My computer is now running at 600mhz because I overclocked it, hahahahahaha!!!”
Ok maybe its not that dramatic, but the lure of a faster PC for free is pretty appealing to most people and most of the time worth the risk. I mean come on what would you rather do? Buy a new chip? Or try and push the one you own past sane barriers into the deep dark reaches of all that is unho… sorry about that I almost got off on a Stephen King rant.
Disclaimer
The following review is intended for people who know about the inner workings of PCs. If you do not know how to change jumper settings or how to install cooling units then please do not attempt to make these changes yourself.
Don’t let people fool you over clocking a chip is very easy. It either requires you to move one jumper on your motherboard or it may be as simple as changing a CMOS setting. That’s it after that is done you will know at your next boot up whether or not it worked.
Ok so lets say you have a 350mhz PC with an AMD Chip and a 100mhz bus motherboard. That means that the multiplier on the motherboard is set to 3.5 (3.5multiplier x 100mhz bus = 350mhz speed)
Of course with different motherboards (133mz bus or the 200mhz bus) you will have different multipliers, but for simplicities sake lets stick to 100mhz since that’s what works best when overclocking.
Ok so lets look at your motherboard booklet and see what we have for multipliers, most motherboards of this generation can go from 2.5 to 5.0, to accommodate 250mhz to 500mhz chips. So we could, in theory, change your 350mhz PC into a 500mhz speed demon. Would it work? Probably not, jumping up more than 100mhz rarely works without complications, but there exceptions to every rule. The Celeron chips are notorious for being able jump up to a lot higher speeds without a problem.
To be safe lets make your 250mhz PC into 300mhz at first. You should always jump in small increments, see what happens and then make adjustments later. Move the appropriate jumper (or CMOS setting) on your motherboard to the 3.0 multiplier. Now reboot the machine and watch what it says when it is doing the memory check, it should say your speed. If it reports the correct speed then continue into windows. If it reports the old speed or even worse some jumble of numbers then quickly turn off the machine and change back the jumper you changed, then recheck your motherboard book and change the jumpers again. If you are positive you changed the correct jumper then the next step is to look at the voltage settings, going to a higher speed may require the next higher voltage setting as well. This is extremely dangerous and the part where you could blow your chip. If you do not care about loosing the chip then go ahead and change the voltage setting to the next highest setting (this is different for all types of motherboards so I can’t really give an example). Now when the jumpers are again set then reboot. If you get the error again then give up because your chip can probably not be overclocked. If it shows the correct speed then continue into windows.
Whoa baby look at it go
This next part requires patience so don’t expect to have it done all in one day. What you need to do is use the machine regularly for a day and make sure you do not get an abundant amount of bluescreen errors. If you find yourself getting errors constantly than you need to do one of 2 things…
1) Don’t overclock the chip
2) Buy a cooling fan
No matter what if you plan to overclock than you should buy yourself an oversized cooling fan for the chip as well as one of the multi fan units that fits right in an open bay of your PC.
If you do not get any errors in a whole day of work then consider yourself overclocked. Now what you can do is change the jumpers once again to the next highest setting and repeat the process all over again. Like I said before I would not go over 100mhz beyond the original speed.
What can go Wrong?
Well the worst thing is you can blow your chip. The most common thing is you simply get bluescreen errors constantly. This occurs because your CPU is attempting to handle more calculations than it was intended to.
What Should I overclock?
Well anyone who owns a Celeron, Early Pentium, or AMD K5/6 chip can overclock with ease. Especially PCs running the old 133 – 400mhz chips. My old 133mhz AMD overclocked to 200mhz without any problems without any additional cooling. Likewise my friend’s 250mhz works great as a 400mhz (he did buy 2 new cooling units though).
People that own a Pentium III or an AMD Athlon should not attempt to overclock. I have only seen it attempted twice and both times it failed. One instance resulted in the person having to replace the chip.
De-Bunking the Myths
Most people who are for overclocking try to say that Intel and AMD only tell you not to do it because they want to sell more chips. I’m sure this is true, who doesn’t want to make more money. They are telling the truth however that overclocking may damage your CPU permanently.
If overclocking worked than why does AMD and Intel sell chips of different speeds? Well technically there is no difference between some of the chips. A 200mhz machine may have the exact same chip as a 300mhz machine. The only difference is that the chip in the 300mhz machine passed certain tests that proved it could handle the higher speeds. The chip in the 200mhz machine may have failed tests as a 300mhz machine, but it passed them all in order to be made into a 200mhz machine. Sometimes the tests it fails have nothing to do with its speed, that’s why overclocking works great on some chips and not on others.
Cooling Cooling Cooling
I cannot stress enough how important it is to make sure you have the proper cooling in your machine when you overclock. You machine may run great for a day or two or ever a month and then it may over heat and blow because of improper cooling.
There are several inexpensive and priceless fans that you can buy. Whether it is a fan that is placed directly on the chip or whether it be a complete cooling system for the entire case. Either way you cannot lose if you add them before you attempt to overclock.
Final Thoughts
Working for the PC shop we overclocked quite a few PCs while I worked there. We would do it provided the owner of the PC signed a waiver excluding us from all responsibility if anything went wrong.
Of all the PCs we did (50-60 while I was there) only about 10 refused to be overclocked. So there is a good possibility that your PC could be running a bit faster than it is now.
One great resource is www.overclockers.com , they will list what chips can be overclocked and what is needed to achieve maximum performance.
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