Overclocking

[sarakoth]

I was messing around with my BIOS and I can't seem to find a way to overclock any of my hardware. Could my computer be unoverclockable!!!

[MysteriouX]

Some bios are designed to prevent overclocking. You should check which version of the BIOS you have.

What brand and model number is your motherboard and which Bios does it use?


Also, if you plan to overclock, make sure you have an efficient cooling system.

Below is just stuff that I think you would be interested to know:
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cooling)

Liquid submersion cooling
An uncommon practice is to submerse the computer's components in a thermally conductive liquid. Personal computers that are cooled in this manner do not generally require any fans or pumps, and may be cooled exclusively by passive heat exchange between the computer's parts, the cooling fluid and the ambient air. Extreme density computers such as the Cray-2 may use additional radiators in order to facilitate heat exchange.
The liquid used must have sufficiently low electrical conductivity in order for it not to interfere with the normal operation of the computer's components. If the liquid is somewhat electrically conductive, it may be necessary to insulate certain parts of components susceptible to electromagnetic interference, such as the CPU.[1] For these reasons, it is preferred that the liquid be dielectric.
Liquids commonly used in this manner include various liquids invented and manufactured for this purpose by 3M, such as Fluorinert. Various oils, including but not limited to cooking, motor and silicone oils have all been successfully used for cooling personal computers.[2]
Evaporation can pose a problem, and the liquid may require either to be regularly refilled or sealed inside the computer's enclosure. Liquid may also slowly seep into and damage components, particularly capacitors, causing a computer that initially functions to fail after hours or days immersed.[citation needed]


In one of the links on that page, there is a paragraph about how some group used liquid nitrogen to cool a P4 3ghz computer and was able to overclock it to 5ghz+.

However, this was only for experimental purposes as such methods would ruin the processor quickly. But (lets say your computer processor is rated at 2Ghz, you can overclock this to about 2.2Ghz and any more than 2.4Ghz would be beyond a reasonable safety margin.)


In the old days (up till P3s), when you install a processor, you had to set in the Bios what bus speed the mainboard should run at multiplied by the voltage setting to match with the rated speed of the processor. Overclocking was done by either setting the bios for a faster bus speed or rating the processor at a higher speed.

But if you want better performance for your computer, I suggest you regularly use a can of compressed air to clean out the fans, heatsinks and air ventilation ports, upgrade your ram to a higher bus speed, regularly use Diskeeper (its better than the disk defrag which comes with windows), perform disk cleanup, turn of un-needed background processes, startups and dlls.

[sarakoth]

Some bios are designed to prevent overclocking. You should check which version of the BIOS you have.

What brand and model number is your motherboard and which Bios does it use?


Also, if you plan to overclock, make sure you have an efficient cooling system.

Below is just stuff that I think you would be interested to know:
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cooling)

Liquid submersion cooling
An uncommon practice is to submerse the computer's components in a thermally conductive liquid. Personal computers that are cooled in this manner do not generally require any fans or pumps, and may be cooled exclusively by passive heat exchange between the computer's parts, the cooling fluid and the ambient air. Extreme density computers such as the Cray-2 may use additional radiators in order to facilitate heat exchange.
The liquid used must have sufficiently low electrical conductivity in order for it not to interfere with the normal operation of the computer's components. If the liquid is somewhat electrically conductive, it may be necessary to insulate certain parts of components susceptible to electromagnetic interference, such as the CPU.[1] For these reasons, it is preferred that the liquid be dielectric.
Liquids commonly used in this manner include various liquids invented and manufactured for this purpose by 3M, such as Fluorinert. Various oils, including but not limited to cooking, motor and silicone oils have all been successfully used for cooling personal computers.[2]
Evaporation can pose a problem, and the liquid may require either to be regularly refilled or sealed inside the computer's enclosure. Liquid may also slowly seep into and damage components, particularly capacitors, causing a computer that initially functions to fail after hours or days immersed.[citation needed]


In one of the links on that page, there is a paragraph about how some group used liquid nitrogen to cool a P4 3ghz computer and was able to overclock it to 5ghz+.

However, this was only for experimental purposes as such methods would ruin the processor quickly. But (lets say your computer processor is rated at 2Ghz, you can overclock this to about 2.2Ghz and any more than 2.4Ghz would be beyond a reasonable safety margin.)


In the old days (up till P3s), when you install a processor, you had to set in the Bios what bus speed the mainboard should run at multiplied by the voltage setting to match with the rated speed of the processor. Overclocking was done by either setting the bios for a faster bus speed or rating the processor at a higher speed.

But if you want better performance for your computer, I suggest you regularly use a can of compressed air to clean out the fans, heatsinks and air ventilation ports, upgrade your ram to a higher bus speed, regularly use Diskeeper (its better than the disk defrag which comes with windows), perform disk cleanup, turn of un-needed background processes, startups and dlls.

Thank you so much.

Would anyone else like to contribute?

[warlock110]

Thank you so much.

Would anyone else like to contribute?

hard modding by putting traces on the CPU pins should work, but that actually takes some knowledge about the situation.

[MysteriouX]

hard modding by putting traces on the CPU pins should work, but that actually takes some knowledge about the situation.

that has a 9 out of 10 chance of failure, u have to be extremely careful about it. And I wouldn't recommend it.

Back in the days of PII chips which used slot type sockets, many PII processors were being modded that way and sold illegally as higher speed ratings then they were supposed to be. 1 technique was soldering off a certain capicator or transister at a certain spot.

[warlock110]

that has a 9 out of 10 chance of failure, u have to be extremely careful about it. And I wouldn't recommend it.

Back in the days of PII chips which used slot type sockets, many PII processors were being modded that way and sold illegally as higher speed ratings then they were supposed to be. 1 technique was soldering off a certain capicator or transister at a certain spot.

naw, what u do is take a really thin copper wire or anything that conducts, and start wrapping around the pins that you want to connect, that makes it reversable, the thin wire is so that the pins won't stick up when u plug the CPU in, that's the old method with CPU that was still using pins, after they remove the pins people uses lead pencils to trace those pins, and it works. everything is reversable though. Soldering is not hard, but it's too much trouble, i have shaky hands haha.

and people rarely buy CPU off souces they don't know (i've always buy them at B&M stores or big online retailer). so those things are avoidable, plus when pop it in and ran hardware detection software, the model should still appear dispite the wrong speed.

[atlantean0208]

I was messing around with my BIOS and I can't seem to find a way to overclock any of my hardware. Could my computer be unoverclockable!!!

computer is so cheap, RAMs also cheap and the CPUs are very fast, dual-core etc, so why you want to overclock , or are you still using a 386 Intel machine with Windows 3.0 with 16MB RAM and 40 MB HD, lol I remember using that one in early 90s

Chiwriter, wordperfect, wordstar, gwbasic, turbo pascal/c, lol this software and the floppy disc bring good old memories back.

With the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 2GB RAM and with good GEFORCE card 8/9, lol just bring it on

[Canuck21]

computer is so cheap, RAMs also cheap and the CPUs are very fast, dual-core etc, so why you want to overclock , or are you still using a 386 Intel machine with Windows 3.0 with 16MB RAM and 40 MB HD, lol I remember using that one in early 90s

Chiwriter, wordperfect, wordstar, gwbasic, turbo pascal/c, lol this software and the floppy disc bring good old memories back.

With the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 2GB RAM and with good GEFORCE card 8/9, lol just bring it on

What?!? No matter how fast your components are out of the box, there's always the possibility to make them even faster.

[MysteriouX]

What?!? No matter how fast your components are out of the box, there's always the possibility to make them even faster.

yeah and there's also the possibility to void the warranty, damage/overheat the components, and finally feel sheepish not listening to advice/warnings given by experts.

[Bangs]

Although overclocking is quite fun to experiment with, I don't recommend it. It shortens the life of your pc hardware, specially if you don't know what youre doing the hardware's life will be very very short with an added smoke effect.

[MysteriouX]

Although overclocking is quite fun to experiment with, I don't recommend it. It shortens the life of your pc hardware, specially if you don't know what youre doing the hardware's life will be very very short with an added smoke effect.

yup, it takes some moderation and experience and technical knowledge before risking a thousand dollar piece of equipment which is hard to replace, especially if your parents bought it for you.

[Canuck21]

yeah and there's also the possibility to void the warranty, damage/overheat the components, and finally feel sheepish not listening to advice/warnings given by experts.

That's the price to pay if you want to squeeze to the last drop. Not anyone can overclock, but there are still many people who do it. You make it sound like there's no use in overclocking any more. It is as valid now as it was years ago.

[Canuck21]

Although overclocking is quite fun to experiment with, I don't recommend it. It shortens the life of your pc hardware, specially if you don't know what youre doing the hardware's life will be very very short with an added smoke effect.

People who overclock tend to upgrade components frequently anyway.

[MysteriouX]

That's the price to pay if you want to squeeze to the last drop. Not anyone can overclock, but there are still many people who do it. You make it sound like there's no use in overclocking any more. It is as valid now as it was years ago.

Then just go buy a faster machine. Just because people don't overclock doesn't mean the don't know how to do it, it means they're wiser with using their computers.

And just because someone overclocks doesn't mean that they actually know or understand what they're doing.

Its not like the old days anymore when we could just mix and match curcuit boards, solder the wires the way we want, piece together different components easily. Electronic components now are finer, the wires on the curcuit boards are thinner making them less tollerant and more sensitive to damage and overheating. And components don't last as long as they use to, in order to make modern components last longer we have to take care of them more carefully. In the old days I can treat my IBM or Apple machines roughly and they will still work fine, but if I treated my Core 2 the same way I treated my PCs I had 20 years ago, my Core 2 would burn out in less then a month.

And software designers aren't helping. In the old days, due to the limited availability of memory/storage and the cost of it, programmers had to carefully write efficient programs which used minimal code to do maximum functionality. Now people don't care anymore and write chunky programs which contain nearly 1/4th lines of code then the program actually needs forcing us to invest more money in the hardware to keep up.

[Canuck21]

Then just go buy a faster machine. Just because people don't overclock doesn't mean the don't know how to do it, it means they're wiser with using their computers.

And just because someone overclocks doesn't mean that they actually know or understand what they're doing.

I never said that. I'm just saying that overclocking is not useless and a bad choice. You can buy a faster machine and make it even faster. That's the point of overclocking, squeezing out the last drop. Personally, I don't overclock, but others do and there's nothing stupid in that.

[sarakoth]

Ok, great! Does anyone know where I can download a BIOS to replace my old one?