Hi all, I'm not much of a pc guru but learning. I have an AMD Athlon thunderbird 1.33 GHZ and would like to know what I can overclock it to and what it entails. Thanks, any help will be appreciated.
Thanks for the info. I didn't see anyplace where they explain how to do it. Guess I'll keep looking or leave it alone.
Two ways my friend pure and simple. If your cpu can nack it increase the fsb (front side bus) this is the speed your processor runs at. or increase your multiplyer. A processors speed is determined by fsb X its multiplyer = cpu speed. you would be far better increasing the multiplier if you are not prefecient with pc's as changing your fsb to a speed that is not supported can hang your system completely. (if this happens reset bios and reboot and your back to scratch) MATE TO BE HONEST I WOULDN'T RECOMEND IT You need extra cooling really if your working the chip alot harder or you can get burn out worst case or inconsistant functioning, uncontrollable shut down(happens whe cpu reaches critical temperature) This is only if you over clock too much. must chips these days are very underspec'ed If you want more speed try increasing your ram or changing your graphics cards, this is where some of the bottle necks are with regards to pc performance. hope this helps
if you would like to know what else you could change to help post your full spec and i'll try to help also tell me why you want more speed, what are you using it for, games?. p.s. i make pc's for a living and i only have a 850mhz 512mb ram and my pc is quite fast for what i need it for!.
Thanks smiff6969, I use it for backing up dvds, online poker, and other odd jobs. Don't do much gaming. It seems to drag so long when I first boot up. I've already got a Nvidia GeForce FX5200 AGP 8X vidio card. I just thought maybe I could get a little more out of my cpu. It's no big deal. Thanks for your reply.
Sounds to me like your pc is just bogged down with rubbish. Your spec sounds fine, i've seen pc's with less spec running quite quick. You may want to check what you have running on startup first. If your pc hangs whilst booting it may be down to lot's of bits of software all trying to startup at the same time. this hogs resources and slows down the boot of your pc. When your pc is fully booted have you got alot of icons in your system tray. (very bottom right of screen push the arrow to see all). also do a virus scan of your pc then run adware to check for shareware. these too can bog down your pc. If all seems ok maybe your pc could juat use a spring clean. i tend to find once a year or so a full format and reinstall keeps your system ship shape. does this mean your pc is ok any other time and is only slow on first bootup????
I'm not sure what OS you're using, Mort. I'd have to agree with Smiff, though. OC'ing really isn't that big of a deal. I can get my processor upwards of 700MHz over stock speeds and I only notice any performance difference in situations where I'm running a non-dedicated server or running a game that's BOT intensive (BF Vietnam, UT2k4, etc.). Plus, I'm honestly not sure how the T-Birds OC. My old Athlon XP (Pally) was a horrid OCer. If you're using XP, try this: Go to your start menu, find "run" and type in "msconfig". After this loads find the far right tab that says "startup". Hit "Disable all" at the bottom right corner checkbox and restart. If things load a lot quicker, you probably have spyware and other nonrelevant programs starting when you boot. Once you've restarted go back to msconfig and put a check in the box next to the programs you want to start. Also, if you plan on overclocking in the future, I'd recommend getting one of the Athlon XP+M chips seeing as Athlon XP won't be around much longer. I think Sempron is taking over in December. The mobile chips are extreme OCers. With a nice heatsync, big fan (or water/phase cooling) you can easily get them upwards of 500-800MHz over stock levels.
Thanks for the info and replies. I have 9 icons in the tray on startup and remove adware and spyware on a regular basis along with hdd defrag. No worries, I'll just leave it alone for now untill I can afford a new cpu, motherboard, and memory. Thanks again.
You will definetly see much more increase by upgrading rather than overclocking. I went from a p3 1ghz to p4 2.8 ghz and there is no comparison. The new processors just make better use of the clock cycles. The new on die memory controller on the AMD chips is one of the best advancements in years, very noticable difference in memory transfer speeds. The new mother boards and their bios features make overclocking a snap. You wont be disappointed.
