athlon 64 in pavillion

my aunt jill is wanting me to overclock her new hp pavillion. its got
an amd athlon 64 in it. is there any way to overclock it without
taking it apart?

GIRunit wrote:
my aunt jill is wanting me to overclock her new hp pavillion. its got
an amd athlon 64 in it. is there any way to overclock it without
taking it apart?

THe factory BIOS will probably not allow it to be overclocked. That
means you'll have to flash it to a hacked version (if you can find one)
and void your warranty. Also, in my experience, off-the-shelf models
like HP and Gateway, etc. are usually crippled by crappy memory and slow
hard drives, not the CPU. Of course, this may have changed. THe HPs I
deal with are all several years old.

-Dylan C

GIRunit wrote:

my aunt jill is wanting me to overclock her new hp pavillion. its got
an amd athlon 64 in it. is there any way to overclock it without
taking it apart?

If the motherboard uses an Nvidia chipset, then there is a chance
you can overclock it with the Clockgen program from www.cpuid.com .
That is called "Windows overclocking", because you do it while
you are in Windows, rather than in the BIOS. It is an option
for people who have a crappy (fixed) BIOS.

The Nvidia chipsets (Nforce3, Nforce4), I believe, do clock
synthesis in the chipset. That is why it is possible for the
author of Clockgen to write a generic module for all Nforce3
or Nforce4 motherboards. For other chipset makers, like maybe
VIA or SIS, the clock signals come from a clock generator chip,
and that must be custom programmed. There are a thousand different
part numbers of clock generator chips used on motherboards, and
the odds that the Clockgen program knows about them, is very small.
Thus, if a non-Nforce chipset is used, then Jill is stuck.

A second program of some use, is A64tweaker. A64tweaker allows
changing memory settings, so you can downclock the memory to
compensate for the upclock from Clockgen.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...t=37345&page=1
http://www.cranox.com/Software/A64-T...r_V0.6beta.zip

(Picture of the A64tweaker panel)
http://www.overclocking.es/modules/w...a64tweaker.jpg

Now, I don't know if there is a way to change the Hypertransport
multiplier on the fly or not. Normally, HT would be 5 x 200.
The 200 is the CPU clock, which is the thing to be changed
with the Clockgen program. HT is limited to 1000MHz, so if
the clock is raised above 200, then the HT multiplier needs
to be dropped. If there is no mechanism to drop it, then the
overclock may be limited to 10% or 20% or so. I don't really
know how far HT will go on a processor, before the wheels fall
off. With some chipsets, like I think ATI, it is possible that
the chipset end of the HT link, can clock quite high. But the
processor end of the HT link may be the limiting end.

The only other thing missing for Jill, is voltage bumping, for
Vdimm or for Vcore. An HP may not have a setting like that in
it, but check the BIOS anyway. While it is possible to change
Vcore, with a gnarly hardware mod (soldering), we don't want to
void the warranty :-)

If the only control you had was the main CPU clock (200MHz),
and you didn't have access to anything else, you might squeeze
10% to 20% out of it, before it crashed. You really need access
to a few different things, to do a better job of overclocking.
An enthusiast motherboard is what you want for a job like this.

When doing overclocking experiments, you should use a different
boot drive. Bring a spare drive. Disconnect Jill's boot drive.
Install the spare. Install Windows on it, your copy of Clockgen,
a copy of Prime95 from mersenne.org (for testing). Sometimes,
when doing overclocking experiments, the boot disk or the
registry stored on it, gets corrupted, and the OS can effectively
be lost to the user. Using a spare boot disk, avoids this fate.
Test with Prime95 (use the torture test option in the menu). Don't
put the original boot drive back in the computer, until Prime95
can run for four hours or more, error free. If you overclock
to a frequency of "X", turn the clock down to 0.95*X before
giving the computer back to Jill. The small margin, is intended
to help the computer continue to run well on a hot day. I call
that the "everyday overclock" frequency for my computer. The
computer I am typing on, is overclocked from 2.8GHz to 3.2GHz
(yawn!), but that is all I could manage with complete
stability. The computer has not crashed once with that
modest overclock.

Paul

Paul wrote:

GIRunit wrote:

my aunt jill is wanting me to overclock her new hp pavillion. its got
an amd athlon 64 in it. is there any way to overclock it without
taking it apart?


When doing overclocking experiments, you should use a different
boot drive. Bring a spare drive. Disconnect Jill's boot drive.
Install the spare. Install Windows on it, your copy of Clockgen,
a copy of Prime95 from mersenne.org (for testing). Sometimes,
when doing overclocking experiments, the boot disk or the
registry stored on it, gets corrupted, and the OS can effectively
be lost to the user. Using a spare boot disk, avoids this fate.

Thats good advice. Corrupting your boot disk isn't exactly common, but
it does happen. I know I've done once or twice. Those were bad days.

Test with Prime95 (use the torture test option in the menu). Don't
put the original boot drive back in the computer, until Prime95
can run for four hours or more, error free. If you overclock
to a frequency of "X", turn the clock down to 0.95*X before
giving the computer back to Jill. The small margin, is intended
to help the computer continue to run well on a hot day.

Its also important to make sure that she cleans the dust out on a
regular basis. Once you start increasing the voltage, you start working
in the upper end of the CPU's temperature range. Dust in your cooler
makes temps creep up even higher and could cause a thermal failure.

-Dylan C

thanks alot you guys ! shes gonna love this!