"LASERandDVDfan" wrote in message
...
Many motherboards have a setup option in the BIOS where you can set the
front side bus (FSB) speed for the processor. Except for Intel boards of
course ;-)

Try looking up why you can't simply overclock an AthlonXP processor
without
unlocking it first.

An AthlonXP with a locked multiplier will only allow you to attempt an
overclock by adjusting the FSB speed, but tweaking with this setting will
push
the processor's clock speed to unstable and potentially damaging levels.



Intel and AMD CPU's have had locked multipliers since the late Pentium 1
class chips, this is nothing new. As the earlier poster said though, usually
you can bump up the FSB speed, which is what is multiplied by the multiplier
to get the final CPU speed. Many boards now let you bump it up in small
increments, though these days I see little point in overclocking. Back in
the day, I had an Intel 125MHz overdrive chip that would easily run at 166
MHz with a FSB change, that was a pretty substantial improvement and made it
as fast as a chip costing more than double what I had. Now days I could
probably overclock my 1.4 GHz Athlon to 1.5 or so, maybe a bit higher if I
really pushed it, but that's a pretty insignificant improvement, and
honestly 1.4 still feels plenty fast to me, it's the hard drive that feels
like the bottleneck.