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General discussion

Over clocking.

Aug 1, 2005 3:05PM PDT

I have heard the phrase " Over Clocking" the processor many times and am confused on just what that means and if it is worth the time and trouble to do it.
I am running a AMD xp 3000 processor with 1 gig of ram on a Aopen 79G max mother board.
I do some gaming and a great deal of graphics work. Would over clocking help me in anyway as it will be awhile before I will be getting a new computer.
Thanks

Discussion is locked

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depends
Aug 1, 2005 4:32PM PDT

better luck upgrading the gfx card

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Thanks:
Aug 2, 2005 2:44AM PDT

I want to thank you all for your input.
I do have the Nvidia chipset and drivers so will go to their site and check it out.
It appears that over clocking has more risks than advantages, so will leave that alone.

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AMD
Aug 1, 2005 6:31PM PDT

I have the same processor and it's set to run at 166 Mhz CPU external frequency with a x 13 multiplier set to auto in the Bios. This gives an FSB of 2156 Mhz, which works for what I need. I don't do gaming though so maybe you'd like to try more. PS If you've got Nvidia drivers there are tune utilities from their site.

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Little improvement for the risk
Aug 2, 2005 1:36AM PDT

OC'ing made some sense when processors were ancient and any improvement was noticed. While OC'ing still goes on, in todays cpus you have prepare greatly or risk a cpu failure. The greatest concern is heat and more so for AMD cpus. Increase cooling will allow any OC'ing to remain "stable" otherwise expect some wierd or outright "non-working" system until return to norms. You can increase ever so little and check results, proceed again if possible and find the wall where things work for the optium best. With new cpus already pushing their own limits its hard to squeeze more out of them, so any improvemnt will be small, thus IMHO not worth the risk. In fact just keeping a cpu running is a defaulted condition is hard to do as these forums dictate, so it truly is a risk. Check this website and similar:
http://www.overclockers.com

tada -----Willy Happy