Written: 6/23/2000
Written By: Chris Kim

Introduction

In this day and age, when the term “fast is not fast enough” is the modow by which nearly all hardcore computer gamers live by, thus creating a black hole of never ending process of new processors and videocards always being released.  Therefore, new processors and videocards are released by the month—it seems as if there is a brand new processor or videocard chipset every week that comes in by the masses.  Even with these fastest chips and videocards out, most hardcore users still demand more and say that the speed from even the fastest chips aren’t fast enough.  Hence, they resort to a process called overclocking, by which users make their processor or videocard run faster than the default recommended speed setting.  In this day and age, overclocking has become a common practice with all of the newest hardware devices reaching overclocks of up to 50% or higher!

What is Overclocking?

Essentially, this is the process of running the device faster than it is specified to do.  Overclocking is an old process that just recently has gone mainstream.  Even back in the days of the 286, overclocks of about 1MHz was considered a successful overclock.  Now a days, the mainstream overclock is with processors reaching much higher overclocks, in the 30%-50% range with some heavy duty cooling.  How is overclocking achieved?  Usually, increasing the frequency at which the processor is multiplied or bus speed run from dictates the speed at which processors will run at.  In the case of videocards, a simple BIOS hack will allow videocards to run at higher than normal frequencies.

What Does Overclocking Yield?

The basic ability to get more performance out certain products is the main aim of overclocking.  Keeping with the saying “fast isn’t fast enough”, hardcore users will push their hardware to the limits by getting their hardware to run as fast as possible by any means necessary.  With a successful overclock, the computer system will run stable and exactly the same as it did at the default factory set frequency.  This often requires more cooling than stock and increasing voltage on processors and larger coolers on videocards.  Since the overclocking improves the speed of both devices, performance improves in accordance to how much the device is overclocked.  Sometimes, when overclocked too much, performance can actually degrade, as the processor or videocard is over stressed beyond optimal frequency settings.

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