how do you overclock a cpu?

[toyofanatic]

how do you overclock a cpu?

[Forvak]

Overclocking a CPU is a dangerous thing to do, the fact that you are asking here says that you should probably study into it for a while before attempting it.

There are three parts to overclocking a CPU.

Uping the Multiplier on the clock speed is the first. All computers hava a small quartz crystal that vibrates at 14.318 million times a second. This speed is then multiplied by some number to get the CPU speed. If you increase the multiplier the CPU will perform more opperations per second.

The second method is upping the Front Side Bus. This is where the CPU interfaces with the rest of the computer. By increasing the speed of this you can increase the speed of data flowing in and out of the CPU.

The third method is to increase the voltage to the CPU. Increasing in increments of .25V is a good amount.

Usually two or all of these methods are used together. All three of these can cause system instablility. In fact commonly people raise these settings until the system becomes unstable, then decrease bit by bit until the system is stable again. All of these settings can be changed in the BIOS. make sure that you update the BIOS before you begin overclocking. Also make sure that ou have a good enough CPU cooler before beginning because you can cook a CPU by overclocking it. The extra speed ends up increasing the heat given off by the CPU and if not properly removed, this heat can Destroy a CPU!

If you are at all shaky about any of the concepts mentioned, FSB, CPU voltage, Multipliers, or BIOS's, I would recommend waiting and learning a lot more!

Hope that helped.

[georgez]

I would suggest against overclocking...in the long run it will damage the hardware.

[Sabre780101]

I think by altering jumper settings on the motherboard and altering bios settings , usually a waste of time , increase is usually not worth the effort , motherboards are fairly cheap nowadays.

[brianthesnail123]

it all depends on your bios as some are blocked to stop support calls but if you go into bios(press del at boot)and go to anvanced power managment ,you are looking for two yhings.....cpu bus speed and multiplier by multiplying these two you get the cpu speed i.e fsb 800mhz....multiplyer 4= 3.2ghz a cpu can normally be safelly overclocked 10 to 20% so a 2ghz cpu can be increased by 200mhz however a japenese company recently overclocked a pentium 4 to 7.5ghz but it was imersed in ice