I've heard of people overclocking their computer. What is it? How do you do it?

Attached Link: http://www.overclock.net/

Yep, Overclock.net is a great forum. If I'm not at rendo I'm there. :-)

In a nutshell, overclocking is changing your hardware settings so it runs faster than factory specs. Basicly squeezing more performance out of your system. My cpu for instance is by default to be run at 2.4ghz. I have it running at 3.6ghz.  Most of your prebuilt systems like HP, Dell, Gateway, etc disable these setting

Interesting.

Overclocking is the practice of speeding up the speed of your CPU by increasing voltage or clock multiplier.

Back "in the old days" overclocking usually meant messing with jumper/bios settings, and just 1 step above your CPU's max would cause major instability and possibly fry your CPU. Nowadays, CPU's are more built for it, along with more efficient cooling methinds, thus manufacturers include software to assist in overclocking. I have a quad core at 2.4 Ghz and I have yet to need to overclock. My old pc was a dual core 3.0 Ghz and I had it overclocked to 3.5 Ghz.

Quote - In a nutshell, overclocking is changing your hardware settings so it runs faster than factory specs. Basicly squeezing more performance out of your system.

At the cost of reduced component lifetime and the need for more/better cooling, so be sure to take time to read and understand the downside.

Thanks for pointing that out, I was just thinking of mentioning it myself. Although I do disagree that overclocking reduces component lifetime as long as you stay within reasonable limits for heat and voltage.

Here's a photo of my case and cooling. q6600 at 1.4vcore 3.6ghz nevepr goes above 62c running prime95 small ffts.

Case is CoolerMaster 690 II Advanced.

Aftermarket Cooler is a CoolerMaster V6GT.

HwMontor software for keeping an eye on temps.

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

Cpu-z for getting various info about your system. Such as speed and voltage.

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

Prime95 for stressing the system to test for stability and max temps.

http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=103

Temperature is proportional to speed. CPUs can work within some limits with clocks higher than the specificated, but this has some problems.

1- The CPU is designed to work at some clock and the fabricant give you the garanty that it will work with this clock. If you increase the clock speed and the CPU fails to work or works in a wrong way the fabricant is not more responsible. How much you can increase the clock speed with the CPU still working properly will depend on who and where was made the CPU, the production party, the screening process and luck. In general it will accept 10 to 20 % speed increase, higher the speed more prone the CPU to malfuncion.

2- Even if the CPU works at higher clocks, the dissipated power will increase and you will need to dissipate this extra heat if you don't want to grill the CPU, so you must use better dissipators and fans. In winter there is little problem, but in hot summer it can be dangerous. Working at higher temperatures decrease the life of the components, CPU, motherboard, sockets. Temperatures does nothing to silicon, but damages its plastic casing.

And, in some cases, leads to spontaneous combustion.

i would never dream of overclocking. Applications like Vue and Poser that can sometimes spend hours days or weeks rendering can not have an unstable, crash prone, shortened life setup. Buy right and buy high end. Overclock if you aren't the type who is bothered by crashes.

For applications like Poser that consume huge amount of memory, much important than the CPU speed is memory speed, that depends on the motherboard, chipset, type and speed of memory card, FSB bus speed and also the type of CPU.

You guys need to do some legitimate research on the matter before you post what you think you know about it.

Prime95 and other programs are designed specifically to stress your system to check for instability, more than poser or vue ever could.

Overclocking is like anything else. Take the time to learn about it and do it right.  

Pay attention to cpu/motherboard/ram setups. Some cpu's like some mobos better than others, will affect you oc. Keep an eye on your temps, I oc'ed for the last 6 years no problems.

Years ago when my system died, I reverted to an old AMD K6-350. Everything worked fine except Divx and some other video files crashed and locked up the system everytime I tried to play or edit them. I tried everything, different codecs, different apps, different OS, but the problem persisted. Finally I remembered that the I had OCed the K6 modestly from 350 to 400 Mhz. When I set it back to stock speed, the problem went away. Apparently, there was some timing sensitive thing in the codecs. Maybe it was something specific to that processor and it's probably ancient history. Generally, I haven't read about people having such problems on a stable OCed system.

Quote - Years ago when my system died, I reverted to an old AMD K6-350. Everything worked fine except Divx and some other video files crashed and locked up the system everytime I tried to play or edit them. I tried everything, different codecs, different apps, different OS, but the problem persisted. Finally I remembered that the I had OCed the K6 modestly from 350 to 400 Mhz. When I set it back to stock speed, the problem went away. Apparently, there was some timing sensitive thing in the codecs. Maybe it was something specific to that processor and it's probably ancient history. Generally, I haven't read about people having such problems on a stable OCed system.

Looks strange, but it can be explained. Access time in semiconductors increase with temperature, in other words, the device is slower to respond and if forced to respond faster due clock speed it can report or change to the wrong state. This is why mainframes are kept in a room with a stable 25 C temperature.

The second part, in older and not so old CPUs the clock speed is always the same, but even the clock speed doesn't change there are some instructions that require very little CPU activity and others a lot with the consequent increase of heat production. When a software is very CPU intensive, the temperature of the chip increases, even the clock speed is the same, and so the access time is increased. As you are working above the specs due overcloacking and you are at the limit, this slower response will produce wrong CPU processing results and your app crash. When your software is less CPU intensive, the temperature drops resulting in faster access time and so no the software works properly.

In modern CPUs and Windows 7 the problem can be even worst because the clock is not more constant. For example, when you have very little computer activity the CPU is running at 800 MHz with the cosequent very liitle heat diissipation and the CPU is runs cool. When the software requires CPU activity the CPU runs at full speed of 2.9 GHz (do't confund with hybernation that is another thing. This is a normal function of Windows 7. When the CPU is runing at nominal speed, it produce heat and the temperature rise. In normal activities the CPU runs very cool.

Now lets suppose that you overclock from 2.9 GHz to 4 GHz, what will happen? Well, most of the time the CPU still will be running at 800 MHz and you will thing that all is ok, but if in some moment your app requires intensive CPU use, the clock will rise to 4GHz (overclocked) with the consequent suden great increase of temperature above the limits. Your CPU will not burn because the app crashed before the heat was propagated and the CPU returned to the 800 MHz clock again.

"Over-clock" is geek speak for "what is your return policy for hardware if it burns out?"  The term is mostly used in past tense form, such as "I over-clocked my system. That's why I am here looking for a new one to buy".

I used to do the opposite, I underclocked my computer so that it would require less cooling, therefore running quieter.

Quote - "Over-clock" is geek speak for "what is your return policy for hardware if it burns out?"  The term is mostly used in past tense form, such as "I over-clocked my system. That's why I am here looking for a new one to buy".

That sort of sums it up, thumbs up!

Reminds me of boring out car cylinders to get more horse power.  The price paid, nice ruptures in the cylinder walls.  Jan

The risk of burning is only one part of the problem, it only affects CPU that have millions and more millions of transistors. If you keep the temperature controlled it will not burn. If you use a CPU that doesn't require heatsink and fan, overclocking it will not burn it. If you overclock the memory it will not burn, you can double the FSB bus clock and it will cause no damge to the memory. The problem is other, it will not work at double speed.

The more serious and subtle problem of overclocking is malfunction. If the malfunction is serious your computer will crash or become unstable, but the malfunction can be small and only happen time to time and you don't notice that something is wrong. You zip a folder and burn it into a DVD for backup, a month later or more you discover that the zip file is corrupt and unusable, you blame the DVD media or the DVD writer. You save a 30 MB Poser pz3 and when open it later the pz3 makes Poser crash. The malfunction only put a strange character in the middle of deltas of some morph target, only one byte wrong amount 30 millions was enough (in other part of a pz3 file you can have several strange characters and nothing serious will happen). Of course, you will blame Poser, Windows or the hard disk.

Info being posted in this thread now is so far off its not even funny. If you truly want to know more about overclocking and want real info on it than go here.

http://overlcock.net

Quote - Info being posted in this thread now is so far off its not even funny. If you truly want to know more about overclocking and want real info on it than go here.

http://overlcock.net

 

I get an error message "Can't find server at www.overlcock.net"

Sorry. http://overclock.net/