Zhukov said:
Oh, I have a question of my own.
What is "overclocking"? In layman's terms.
When you take a clock and put it on top of another clock.
Zhukov said:
I am given to understand it is some kind of arcane PC ritual that increases performance somehow, but beyond that I have no idea.
Sort of. Though I wouldn't really call it arcane, though it does resemble a ritual. Essentially, in layman's terms, you've summed it well. It increases performance. That's pretty much about it, really. It could be paraphrased as "raising the Hz" because that's what happens - you can have a, say, 2 GHz processor and overclock it to 2.5 GHz or even 3 GHz. Which increases the performance because, you know, it now works faster.
The term comes from the fact that processors have a clock speed (what gives you the Hz number[footnote]it's actually a clock speed and tick rating - for example, 20 ticks each at 100 MHz would produce a 2GHz[footnote]the maths is dead simple: 100 MHz x 20 = 2000 MHz = 2 GHz. The tick rating is also known as "multiplier" for precisely the reason you see here[/footnote] [/footnote]), when you increase that clock speed you are
overclock-ing it.
Zhukov said:
Does it involve pentagrams?
YEEE-
no. Actually. It's much more boring than that. You just restart, oveclock, run your PC, see how it behaves (does it crash, does it turn on, etc) and then...repeat the process. It's a trial and error requiring patience more than anything. You repeat the process until you get stable results and you can't go higher. Or whatever - you can stop earlier, if you want.
There are few variables you can tweak - clock speed, CPU multiplier and voltage, being the most important ones. The first two give you your CPU speed, but after increasing that for a while, you might need to increase the voltage, because now the CPU requires more power. The other thing, aside from power consumption, that overclocking increases is heat output, so you could also try to improve your cooling somehow. Usually means installing a new one, whether it is a bigger fan with more RPM, a better radiator or something like liquid cooling or even submerging your PC in oil[footnote]yes, that's a thing - it does help cooling[/footnote].
It's really annoying to do it, since you have to restart every time - you change the clock speed/tickrate and the voltage from the BIOS. It should just be that, in fact - go to BIOS and find where it says something about CPU and it should give you the option to change these values (you do need an unlocked CPU, though, some can't be overclocked). And also annoyingly, you could set the CPU frequency to something that doesn't run at all, which means you have to open your case (you probably want to leave it open anyway), find the jumper that resets the BIOS on the motherboard[footnote]it probably says "Reset" next to it, alternatively, check your motherboard documentation[/footnote] and short circuit it. Yeah, that's it - the jumper consists of two pins sticking up - get anything that's conductive (a screwdriver can work) and touch both pins. Done. Reboot. For the record, you can apply the same technique to turn on or reset your PC as they use the same kind of pins. At any rate, the other annoying thing is that it's not exactly the CPU speed that matters but it
is the clock speed and multiplier - 10 x 200 MHz and 20 x 100 MHz (for example) both give you 2 GHz but one could work, the other one not. You have to go through a lot of variations of these two parameters to see what would actually work for you. Finally, you want to use something to measure the temperature (as I said earlier in this thread - I use SpeedFan, myself) and then force your CPU to be under load (simplest way - download and run Prime95) - observe your CPU for a few minutes and see if it doesn't get too hot too fast.
I think that's mostly it, really. That's overclocking. Well, CPU only, but the video cards operate in broadly the same way. You can also overclock RAM but it's pretty much useless - not much benefit for a lot of work.
