My current obsession is with overclocking. Overclocking simply means to run a processor at a speed greater than the prescribed one. AMD Processors (Athlon, Opteron etc) are well known for their overclocking ability. My current chip is an Opteron 165 that is rated to run at 1.8Ghz (remember its a dual core). I’m currently running it at 2.8Ghz which is about 60% Overclock.
It’s great fun to assemble your computer and then mess around with the bios, tweaking the voltage to your proc, the FSB to your memory etc. But you have to be really careful with this overclocking thing. There are great many photos on the net showing fried CPUs, those that couldn’t take the voltage supplied by their masters. An important part of OC-ing is to keep your processor cool. So if you up the voltage to the core of your processor the proc. temperature will go up. Therefore OC-ing through voltage raising should be the last resort.
The amount of OC-ing also depends on the MotherBoard (MoBo) you have. I have a DFI Lanparty CFX-3200-DR/G that’s literally an OC’s dream board. I can change a lot of parameters for the memory modules I use.
You overclock a processory by increasing the FrontSide Bus speed. This speed for my opteron was 200Mhz. Then there’s the FSB multiplier which is 9. Therefore the speed for my proc was 1800Mhz (200*9). So the best way to OC is to increase the FSB. But if you increase the FSB you will face a limitation by the memory. Most DDR memory are rated at 200Mhz and will work well up to around 220Mhz. Therefore you are looking at a max OC of around 1980Mhz.
This is where the MoBo comes in. If your Mobo allows you to have steppings then you can [...]

Read more at Karthik S

Popularity: 1% [?]