This overclocking business - how does it work?

[Oi_Oi_Savaloy]

The title says it all really?

Can you just open something up on your desktop and fiddle around with the settings (and watch your PC go Phffft!) or is it a tad more complicated than that?!

[tim_s]

i think there's a multiplier switch on your motherboard or CPU which you have to mess about with.

[Liszt]

In the bois there are a number of numbers and multpliers. They are multiplied to get the clock speed. You can adjust these to get the machine to run faster. This makes the cpu unstale and introduces heat. So you slap a bigger cooler on it.

Then you can start playing with the cpu voltage to reduce heat as well.

To be honest, overclocking has died abit of a death for CPUs as these now are no longer being stretched. You are only normally going to get a

[davidd]

I run an over clocked AMD at home. More a case of I can rather than I actually need to (I'm still a bit of a geek you see).

The basisc are pretty simple, go and have a look on the forums at overclockers.co.uk.

Just remember

cooling, cooling, cooling.

D.

[TUS 373]

I'm using an Athlon XP2500 (£70) as if it was an Athlon XP3000 (£210). It cost £20 for a bigger heat sink than normal for the cooling - and is ultra stable.

So I'm getting alot more for very little outlay. That's overclocking.

[agent006]

Oi_Oi_Savaloy said:

The title says it all really? Can you just open something up on your desktop and fiddle around with the settings (and watch your PC go Phffft!) or is it a tad more complicated than that?!

If your pc was made by any of the big manufacturers then forget it.
If it's intel and you want it to work for more than about half an hour, forget it.

[plotloss]

It used to be easy to bugger about but the chip companies stopped all that.

You can tease voltage and try and up the bus for a bit of power but its never going to yield much.

The big gains are in modifying the multiplier on the chip but this requires buggering about with it on a hardware level, solder etc.