Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Special > Miscellaneous > Overclocking Guide

Overclocking Guide

06:00 - Thursday 2 January 1997 by Thomas Pabst

1. What Is Overclocking?
2. Why Not Overclocking?
3. Is Overclocking Immoral?
4. Overclocking - Some Thoughts
5. Overclocking Requirements
6. Correct Overclocking - The Goals
7. Correct Overclocking - The Techniques

The term 'overclocking' describes the process of running your CPU at a clock and/or bus speed that the CPU hasn't been specified for - logically, that speed is usually higher.

Why Overclocking?

The tempting idea behind overclocking is to increase system performance at very little cost. In many cases you only need to change a few settings on your motherboard to make your system run faster. In other cases you only have to add a few components (usually for cooling) to achieve the performance increase.

In the past, overclocking was usually nothing more than increasing a CPU's clock speed to that of the next higher model, e.g. a Pentium 120 to a Pentium 133. Now, with new bus speeds available on several motherboards, you can change the clock and bus speed of a CPU to values that don't officially exist. This new way of overclocking is yielding an even higher performance increase than the classic one. It even gives you the ability to increase the performance of the fastest model of a particular CPU production line (e.g. P200 to 250 MHz, PPro 200 to 233 MHz).