How to Overclock Your Computer's CPU

Although your computer's processor may only run at, say, 2 GHz, that may not be the last word. As crafty computer nerds have discovered, it is possible to overclock your computer's CPU; to set it to run faster than it was designed to, and squeeze out a little bit more performance. Want to give it a shot? It's not hard, but be careful, because of you overdo it you may just end up frying your computer. (I hereby excuse myself from responsibility for any such unfortunate outcomes)

Overclocking your CPU will cause it to generate much more heat than it would otherwise, potentially causing trouble. Before you begin, you want to make sure that your computer is equipped with the best possible cooling system. You may need to install an new and better CPU cooling fan, available from your local computer store. If you have a laptop, your options are somewhat more limited. Due to laptops' compact design, cooling is a much bigger problem. As a result, overclocking a laptop is a bad idea, if not a fire hazard. Once you're sure your computer's CPU is as well cooled as possible, it's time to see just exactly what you can do.

Processor speed is determined by multiplying two factors: The front side bus (FSB) speed and the clock multiplier. For example, a 400 MHz processor might have an FSB speed of 100 MHz, and a clock multiplier of 4x. These are the factors we have to work with.

In the old days, a person could theoretically mess with either setting, but no longer. Most modern processors are hardware locked, meaning that the clock multiplier is built into the chip. Oh well. It turns out that you will instead be overclocking your FSB.

Before trying this, you will need to figure out exactly how much you can get away with. Although you could theoretically overclock a CPU as far as you want, at some point you will overcome the physical limits of the chip, and burn it out. Literally. Melt and burn. If this possibility scares you, think twice about proceeding. If you are confident that you know what your are doing, download SANDRA from SiSoftware. A freeware version is available. (Mac users can use Symantech's Norton Utilities) This program will essentially run a stress test on your CPU, running it as fast and as hard as possible for several hours, all the while monitoring its temperature and keeping tabs on the situation. If running SANDRA causes your computer to crash, your computer is not suited to overclocking. If not, the program can tell you exactly how fast your computer is able to go. Do the math, and figure out what this means in terms of an FSB speed. Reboot your computer, open the boot menu, (often available by tapping F2 or F12 while booting) find the FSB setting, and bump it up to the desired point. (I should mention that I hope you backed everything up before you started)

Although you might not get any improvement out of your computer at all, you could get as much as 25%. Definitely not worth it for economic reasons, probably not helpful to most users, but certainly a source of satisfaction for a certain kind of computer nerd.