Overclocking your computer

By Joshua Erdman
Digital Foundation, inc.

Overclocking is a great way to get major performance from your computer, but there are many more things to keep in mind. The first is to make sure you have taken all other measures to ensure your computer is running as efficient as possible. Each area of performance is outlined in the Performance Main Page.

Cooling

The most important factor before you even begin to overclock any computer component is to make sure you have the best cooling possible. Read our article on extreme cooling techniques before you begin to overclock your computer.

What components can I overclock?

Now that you got cooling down we can go over all the components that you can overclock.

Overclocking the CPU

The most effective and obvious component for overclocking is your CPU. Most CPUs are built with high quality and the chip that you are using may be the same chip (with just a different sticker) as the faster processors. A few years ago when Intel was selling their Celeron 450s and 300s, Intel ran out of stock on the 300s because there was so much demand. So they just repackaged the 450s as 300s and sold them as the Celeron 300A. If you were lucky enough to get one of these repacked 300s you could run it at 450 MHz with no hiccup. That was probably the best overclocking I ever did without having to take drastic cooling measures.

Calculating CPU Speed

The CPU speed is based on two measurements, the Front Side Bus speed (FSB) and the clock multiplier. The Celeron 300 I mentioned earlier would run on a motherboard with a 66MHz FSB and a clock multiplier of 4.5x. The overclocking method used to achieve the 450MHz speed was to set the FSB speed to 100MHz. As you can see the CPU speed is set by taking the clock multiplier and multiplying it to the speed of the FSB.

Today most CPUs are processor locked. Meaning that the clock multiplier settings are built into the chip so the clock multiplier cannot be changed (even if you specify a different multiplier on your motherboard, it remains fixed on the CPU). This leaves you with one other way to overclock your computer, you can just increase your FSB speed.

Overclock your motherboard

The FSB speed is not just the speed in which the CPU and motherboard communicate, it is the speed in which the whole motherboard will run. It also increases the speed for the PCI bus and memory access. So proper cooling for the whole motherboard should go without mention. You also need to ensure that the memory (RAM) installed can handle these higher speeds. Each RAM chip that you buy is rated at a specific speed. Be careful with who you buy it from. Many slower chips are being sold mislabelled as faster chips. The best place to get high quality RAM is Crucial.com.

Also since the PCI bus is being overclocked you should make sure you have high quality components that can handle higher PCI bus speeds than the intended design standard. The best resource for overclocking would be at Tom's Hardware Guide. They have many articles on the best motherboard and CPU and also give great tips on How to speed up your RAM.

References:
Computer Performance
Extreme Cooling Techniques

Article last reviewed: 10/05/2002

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Created by: Digital Foundation, inc.

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