Speeding up Your Computer

No, you see there are two facters, the cpu multiplier, and the FSB clock.

To put it in simpler terms.

Think about your bike changing gears, the cpu multiplier is the large gear change, and the FSB clock is the small gear change.

You almost NEVER change the cpu multiplier because it is such a drastic change your computer wont be stable. You chaneg the FSB clock.

Now the performance is a combo of the two, ie, hypothetically, your cpu multiplier is 8x and FSB maybe 300 herts, thats pretty much 2.4 ghz, if you add 20 herts its around 2.56 ghz. Its not exactly linear.

But, usually with a decent cpu you can overclock a lot.

Assuming you have the right cooling, you can overclock an intel quad core Q9450 from 2.66 GHZ, to around 3.4 GHZ. That is a massive change, even getting it to 2.88 is a significant improvement.

Personally I can only get mine to 2.88, but thats because I need to install some new cooling, Im using stock and any higher and my cpu hits around 70 degrees celsius, which is way too high.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

OK, that answers my question. Now overclocking is only worthy to do for gamers and heavy application users, right?

So for an average webbrowser and such there is simply no point in doing so...

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Syz, yes the most heavy users are gamers, but thats usually because gamers love to "pimp their pcs" and while doing that you gain a lotta technical know how that most people dont know. Overclocking is one of those.

But overclockign is very simple, easy to do, and is the ONLY surefire way to improve your computers speeds without upgrading it.

All those registry cleaners do is turn off as many things as possible without harming your computer.

It does take off the laod from your cpu, but after a while you hit a brick wall and cant go further.

CPU overclocking can take you way farther than that.

But syz, the one must have thign is a good cooling supply, if you give me a budget i can recommend some very good air cooling and watercoooling.

Also, I need to know what kind of cpu you have. and preferably your motherboard.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

There really is no maximum. Each CPU is different, some can only get lets say 3.0 ghz on an itnel core 2, some 3.4, i even heard a guy that got 4.0, the way you do overclocking is by increasing the FSB a small amount, booting computer, running a program that has high demand on a cpu, there are specially built programs that test stability.

If it passes you add some mroe to FSB, I advise you to increase in 20 hertz increments,

If you do it right, than when you do fail the test, you go to BIOS and take it down to your previous settings.

Now the mistake amateurs like Red's friend made is that he increased way too much to the point where the computer would destabalize during the boot up, and doing that requires the removal of a specific chip on the board to reset the BIOS, but if you do it small enough, when your computer destabalizes you should still be able to boot it up, get to BIOS, and change it.

But to give you a good estimate I need to know what cpu you have and what cooling.

 

I am only interested because I am the curious type, on the theorethical level. If I want better computer, I would buy one, since my desktops are 6 and 3 years old.

But that brings down to the basic question: If I am happy with the performance, and I got out of my online experience as much as I want, why would I want to mess with it? For games we have the Xbox 360, and otherwise we only play cardgames and puzzles, not exactly CPU needy applications.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

The only thing I care about is when I watch movies, but that quality depends on the website and the connection speed, not on the CPU power.

So thanks for the offer, but I am happy with the desktops I have. I did change powersupply in them and the one I got from Ebay has extra cooling in it.

With laptops, I am actually looking for the smaller type of netbooks, because the last we got with its 17 inch, is too big and heavy. So size and speed are not always the bigger the better...

 

The common misconception about CPUs is in what they do. They arent like some specific chip ie, a graphics card or internet card, sound card, etc.

Its more like your computers super tool. The computer uses the cpu for everything, and speeding up a cpu improves everything. The nice thing about overclcoking motherboards and CPUs is that it makes everything faster.

 

My internetspeed is pretty dandy. Now why would I get happier if I get the poker cards 2 nanoseconds faster?

Also, you can use nitro in a carengine, and you do go faster, for a while, but your engine gets killed faster too. There was a reason why a certain computer was designed with a certain speed...

There is always a payoff...

 

Yeah, overclocking is only of interest for intensive applications (high-end gaming, video encoding, fancy database stuff, scientific computation, etc.). For 95% of personal computer users, there is no noticeable benefit.

 

That is true, but in reality your cpu was designed to be usable for 10 years. Overclocking does cut down on the lifetime, but not to an extreme amount. Most people would have replaced their cpu's by then.

If you want to, you can underclock yuor cpu and increase its lifespan...

 

Not really, its jsut that 95% of people that know how to do overclcocking are gamers, encoders etc.

Speeding up yuor cpu speeds up everything.

 

It matters not how fast your pc is, it is how fast the server you are contacting releases the information. You can have the fastest pc on the planet, it does not mean a thing to the connecting server.

 

yes and no. It does matter what is on your PC and how you access the net. It just occured to me that the cheapest and fastest way to speed up your PC is to use Linux. With its much smaller memory requirement on my dual boot laptop when I am on Ubuntu, the web comes 80% or so faster.

It takes 1-2 hours to install Ubuntu vs. messing with overclocking....Special note: It is only good for fast websurfing, I don't use it for anything else.

 

No, but Pentiums that fitted the slot architecture were covered in plastic;

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

So it's not inconceivable that this could get hot, melt, or even catch fire.

The heat sink should, that's should, be clipped on as well as using conductive paste. But like nobody was ever too keen when building a new rig to cut a few corners, and intend to go back later and fix steps they skipped. I've missed out motherboard risers and only attached disks with one screw, etc etc.

Also, after a PC fire, unless you're a forensics expert, it might be kinda hard to work out exactly what caused what. Maybe the fan on the sink failed first, who knows?

 

or bearing on an overworked fan? I don't know.