Forgive me all if this has been covered before. I searched and couldn’t find any relevant info in the topics it turned up.
This brings me to my topic. I’ve got a 566 mghz Celeron processor. I’m trying to overclock it to run approx 850 mghz (if the sites that I’ve seen are correct anyway). They say you mess with the jumpers(?) on the motherboard so you can go into CMOS and change the front side bus speed. If this is correct I cannot friggin’ find the jumpers(?) on the motherboard and thus I cannot change the front side bus speed in the CMOS. Please any dopers that wanna smack me and tell me how little I know about computers come in here and correct me (as long as you can help that is). If you need any other pertinent info about my system it’s a Gateway (I don’t know if that helps).
OOPS! Please would the first mod that sees this horrible thing that I’ve done move this to GQ? I’ve made a big ol’ accident. (Next time Dipp look at the friggin’ forum and make sure you are putting it in the right place)
If you can’t find jumpers on your motherboard, and the best info you can give us about your computer is that it’s “a gateway”, you probably shouldn’t be O/Cing it. However, if you MUST overclock, look in your motherboard manual. It will tell you where the CMOS access jumper is.
From there, you’ll be able to hit F2 or some such key during bootup to access the BIOS setup program. In there, you MAY (big may…most OEM mobos don’t have many voltage/bus/CPU speed options) you can start fiddling.
But, again, my reccomendation would be that you don’t risk it. In a case such as this, if you don’t know what you’re doing without having to ask, you should REALLY learn more beyond mere step by step instructions before you start screwing around with anything this potentially damaging to your system.
I know what jumpers are I just didn’t know whether or not they are the things to be tampering with. I’ve seen different sites say different things. I know where jumpers are I just cannot find the things on it. I’ve located them on my old computer (I didn’t do anything to it). I’m a bit more computer literate than you think. Granted I don’t know enough to be a tech or anything along those lines is why I’m asking. I’ve lost the manual to my motherboard and have looked and looked and looked for the thing and I cannot find it anywhere (that is why I posted this in the first palce). I’ll look again tomorrow 'cause if I can find it then I’ll be in business. I just figured the friendly SD patrons could help me out. Oh and the bit about my system being a gateway I was asking if anyone needed any other information other than that.
Some x86 motherboards are “jumperless” – meaning that if you want to overclock your motherboard, you go into the BIOS Setup Screen and make the setting changes there.
If your bus speed and multiplier settings are in fact controlled by jumpers on your motherboard, then you’re definitely going to want to find a copy of the manual to your PC’s motherboard. Sometimes motherboards have (in extremely small type) a short description on the mobo itself for each particular jumper, but trying to search for them while the board is in your PC’s case might be more trouble than it’s worth.
I’d imagine that Gateway has Adobe-Acrobat compatible copies of their various board manuals available somewhere: getting a hold of them on the phone and asking for the link would probably be your best bet.
Motherboards are all different. Some require you to mess with physical jumpers on the motherboard. Others allow you to change things in the BIOS. You should not attempt this unless you have your motherboard manual and are sure as to how to proceed. Randomly moving jumpers or changing BIOS settings can render your computer inoperable. If you can’t find your MB manual, you may be able to download a .pdf version from the manufacturer. Without that, there’s little help that can be given here.
You do know that overclocking will significantly shorten the life of your chip, right? And that overheating may cause glitches that otherwise wouldn’t happen?
The reason you can’t find the jumpers is probably because they don’t want you to. You won’t get much performance change if you do this & you may have a mess to deal with.
Different mobos work differently. Some have jumpers, some have dip switches, some do it via the BIOS and some are a combination of the above. Some, however, have no such adjustments available. I do not know for certain but it would not surprise me at all if companies such as Gateway and Dell make certain no such options are available to its users. People doing this sort of thing make for tech support nightmares for them (note that overclocking your CPU voids the warranty on your whole computer). Also, they want you to return to them to buy a NEW PC…not upgrade the speed of your PC for free.
In the end you need to find the manufacturer and model of your mobo so you can dig up the appropriate instructions that tell you what arrangement of jumpers will give you what results. Also realize that overclocking may necessitate upping the voltage your CPU runs on.
Also, increasing the Front Side Bus speed may work fine for your CPU but cause peripheral cards to fail (you’ve essentially sped them up as well). Some of the newer and nicer mobos allow you to separate the bus overclocking to protect add-on cards from just this sort of thing when overclocking.
In short, overclocking is a good way to fry your system if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s not too hard once you’ve read up on it but ignorance in this case can be quite dangerous to your PC.
Not necessarily true. It depends on how far you push the overclocking. The difference between a (say) Pentium 950 and a Pentium 800 is absolutley nothing. They come off the same fabrication line. Early in the production cycle chips are measured for their reliablility. Some will do 900 while some fail and only manage 800 and thus they get branded as such. Eventually the manufacturing line gets refined and every chip produced can manage 950. Intel still manually turns down the speed of some of the chips so they can sell a range of products. However, if you know how to do it the chip will quite happily and safely run at the higher speeds.
Basically, if you buy the ‘fastest’ chip available at any given moment its overclocking ability will probably be limited since the manufacturer has essentially already found the fastest safe speed for the chip to run at and sold it to you. However, a year later when the same model (i.e. P-III Coppermine) has faster speeds then it is likely the slower speed chips are capable of the faster speeds.
If you’re careful when overclocking you spend a lot of time slowly tweaking your system faster and faster till you start to notice it becoming unstable then back it off to the previous stable state. Doing it right is fairly safe for your computer but doing it right is tedious and long work.
Considering you can buy 1+ GHz Athlon chips for around $200 it might be best just buy a new CPU (how much is your time worth?).
true but the motherboards are not compatable so throw in another $120 for that, then you spend the time disassembling and reassembling and if you do it right reinstalling windows.
but a celeron 800 is $125 and a slot1 to socket 370 adapter is another $9. With that adapter you might be able to get a p3 1gh for about $275 but your motherboard probally won’t accept it
I was poking around in a Gateway the other day and was pleasantly suprised to note that it had a set of jumpers. One never knows with proprietary boards, but you might get lucky.
With the 566, the overclock is really simple. Find manual, locate jumpers, change the front side bus from 66 MHz to 100 MHz. That’s it. Almost all Celeron II 566s will do 850 without any additional work. You’ll also benefit from the fatter memory bandwidth.
Don’t even mess with the multiplier; Celeries are clock-locked. In the extremely unlikely event that your system becomes unstable, try boosting your voltage (also probably in the same area as the FSB jumpers) incrementally until it is stable. You probably shouldn’t go above 1.85 V. If that fails, blame the RAM, which may be of low quality since it doesn’t even need to be PC 100 rated. Also, don’t forget to switch the AGP divider from 1/1 to 2/3 if you are running a graphics card in the AGP port.
I have a Celeron II 533 running at 896, and I can tell you that it is the difference between easily running modern games and suffering from framerate envy. Plus, I’m pulling one over on The Man!
Thanks Sofa. I’ll try that whenever I get the time to mess with my pc between classes and AFTER I find the manual. I don’t feel comfortable enough with it to do it. And everyone else thanks also!
Yeah, why would you want a 50% performance gain from your processor? :rolleyes:
I’m not sure what mainboards Gateway is using these days, but you may want to check out SoftFSB which allows you to manipulate the front side bus without messing with jumpers, dip switches, or bios settings if your mainboard is supported.
I will warn you that in my experience Gateway is very cheap when it comes to CPU cooling, and your processor will run hotter at 50% above design speed. You should seriously consider a heat sink & fan combo better than Gateway stock. Be very careful if your bios doesn’t have a temp warning.
All overclockers will tell you, you run the risk of toasting your CPU. I’ve never seen it happen, but I’ve heard of it.
And note Sofa King’s advice about the AGP clock, which has to be changed in the bios.