| Goofy666 | 29th March 2005 23:24 |
I was asked to write a 'short' introduction to overclocking that would be placed at the info page about the Dry Ice run, so that people would understand the 'basics' of this run's purpose. Here is the 'article' I wrote (it is longer than I originally imagined :p), I would like to get some comments about it (do you think that 'newbies' would understand it, etc.).
My apologies if this should be placed somewhere else.
Here it goes: Quote:
*First of all, this is meant to be a _short_ and _simple_ explanation about overclocking, so not nearly every detail of overclocking shall be explained here.*
What is overclocking?
Overclocking is the 'art' employed to make components (in this case components of a computer) run faster than the standard speeds at which this particular component does its job.
Basicly, there are two settings which determine the clockspeed of your CPU. These are the FSB (e.g. used with Intel and AMD Athlon XP platforms) or HTT (used for AMD Athlon 64 platforms) and the CPU multiplier. For example, when you have the FSB/HTT running at 200Mhz, and the multiplier is set to 11, a simple math calculation tells us that that CPU runs at 2.2Ghz (200Mhz x 11). So there are two ways of overclocking your CPU; by increasing the FSB/HTT or the multiplier.
Since the multiplier is locked with most modern (affordable :p) CPU's (you can't increase it - only decreasing is possible), overclocking should be done by increasing the FSB/HTT (and decreasing the multiplier as you adjust the FSB/HTT higer and higher). In my opinion this is getting a bit too technical for a short introduction though, so I will proceed this text with a comparing example; I will (try to) illustrate the principle of overclocking a CPU by comparing it to cycling :-).
Imagine a bicycle. Its treadles represent the FSB/HTT, the gears represent the multiplier of a CPU. In order to get speed with that bicycle, you need to pedal. Pedaling goes easy on a low (= 'light') gear. Now crank up that virtual gear to its maximum. No easy pedaling anymore, eh? But with the gear on its lowest position you still need to pedal very hard to get reasonable speed. The trick is to find the right balance between your gears and the pedaling you need to do. Less gear makes it easier to pedal harder, but higher gears give you more speed with (a bit) less pedaling.
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