CPU Overclocking

It’s time to get down to the nitty gritty of overclocking your CPU, the bulk of which takes place in the BIOS. This tiny operating system is built into your motherboard and governs the hardware in your machine and can be basically described as the ignition that gets your PC up and running. As your PC boots up, the BIOS completes three main tasks. A Power On Self Test (POST) which checks to see all the required hardware is present and correct, it then looks for any other BIOSs (like ones found on graphics cards) and initiated them, and finally starts the boot sequence at which time Windows/Linux kicks in. The beauty of the BIOS is that it allowed users to manually configure their hardware – something you’re going to do with our CPU to obtain a faster clock speed. Once you’re into your BIOS (usually pushing the Del {Delete} or F1 button while the system performs the memory test will get you in) you’ll need to scroll to the screen titled ‘Advanced Chipset features’. The main items of interest for us here are the CPU external frequency (otherwise known as the front side bus or FSB for short) and CPU frequency multiplier (otherwise known as the multiplier). Multiplying these two figures together tells you what our clock speed will be once you re-boot. As an example, if the FBS 166 and the multiplier at 12.5, the maths tells us (166 x 12.5) that the clock speed is set at 2075MHz. By changing these figures you can in turn change the clock speed of your CPU thus overclocking it to run faster. As far as your CPU and motherboard are concerned, the safest way to overclock your CPU is to raise the multiplier figure by the smallest increment possible. In the example shown above if the multiplier was raised to 13 and the FSB left alone at 166MHz the new speed would be 2158MHz – an increase of 83MHz. Save your new settings and exit the BIOS to see if your system starts – if everything’s okay once you’ve testing it thoroughly, you’ve successfully overclocked your CPU.

Clocker added this on 26 February 2004 - 18:56
After you hit the wall with the frequency increases, then an extra shot of voltage is called for. Continue with the FSB increase until you BSOD again. Now is the time to really pay attention to temps, as even a small increase in voltage will cause the temps to rise. Some motherboards will also allow you to increase the voltage to the RAM which may help as you go higher. Repeat the process as far as you dare....
This process can be quite dangerous to your components so as clocker suggest only push your parts as far as you think they will go, as you could do alot damage to your processor.

Bad Intel

Unfortunately, if you’re using an Intel CPU this method of overclocking is out of your reach – there is no way of altering the multiplier on their chips (the option in the BIOS will be greyed out). Should you have an AMD Athlon XP however, you’re in luck, these chips can be unlocked.

Abu_has_the_power added this on 26 February 2004 - 03:14
Intel's processors overclock just as well as AMD's do. For example, compare the scores i get from PC performance benchmarks and the scores that Bigdawgfoxx get's, AMD chips overclock very well, but they don't reach as high as intel CPU's do.
This shows that there are ways around Intel's chips being locked so ask some of the members who use Intel chips and im sure they will be able to help you more than I can because i use an AMD.
Overclocking Guide I susgest you read it.

Peerzyboy