Tweaking Optimizing Windows.pdf - GEGeek

More documents

Recommendations

Info

IMPORTANT FACTORS FOR SUCCESSFUL OVERCLOCKING Cpu cooling (discussed in detail further down) Your CPU Heatsink/Fan might do the trick, but it's very likely you'll need a top quality combo. Another, often overlooked fact is that a simple Thermal Compound (from www.overclockers.co.uk) applied between the heatsink and the CPU can provide for much better heat transfer and cooler Processor. Tip: A thermal compound called "Arctic Grease", although somewhat pricey seems to be very popular among overclockers these days. Case cooling The temperature inside the case will also increase, as a result of overclocking, heating all of the devices and possibly increasing the chance of a crash. For ATX cases, I'd recommend an additional intake fan and exhaust fan. The size of the case as well as the placement of the cables inside will also affect its cooling, get rounded cables if you can for best air flow in the case and use air filters in front of the intake fans and vents, keep your case cover on for correct airflow and to reduce dust buildup (dust is an important enemy, it acts as an insulator keeping your hardware even warmer). For proper airflow, a simple rule might help reduce heat in your case even further, just install one more exhaust fan than your intake fans - it's more important to remove warm air from the case, than to blow cold air in... Something learned from experience. Quality components RAM, Hard Disks, Video Cards all can stop functioning at higher bus speeds, quality components are of course less susceptible to failure under stress. Also, well built, brand name motherboards can definitely make the difference between success and failure. Abit and Asus are two well known very overclockable, easy and friendly motherboards. Monitoring software There are certain software packages out there that help you monitor CPU & motherboard temperature, as well as fan speed. These software utilities can either show readings on demand, or they can be left running in your system tray, displaying temperatures and warnings... These utilities rely on new motherboards with Temperature sensors built into the motherboard. Most high-end motherboards manufactured in the last few years have this capability, some even have the temperature and fan speed readings in the BIOS as well. Motherboard Monitor - is a tool that will display information from the sensor chip on your motherboard in your Windows system tray. MBM supports a wide range of Chipsets & Sensor Chip combinations. WCPUID - is a program that displays detailed information about the CPU in your system. Shows Internal / External Clock, Multiplier, Cache info., AGP Info. etc ... It's very detailed and can help you see and confirm what your computer's current settings are. It's a good overclocking tool in the sense that you can confirm what you are actually doing. THE OVERCLOCKING PROCESS For an Intel based system, the first thing to check is whether or not you can configure the processor speed and internal voltage within the BIOS. Most newer motherboards, as well as most older ABIT boards, support "jumperless" configuring. If you are lucky enough to have such a system, your job is simple. All you need to do is raise the processor speed to what you want, change the voltage if necessary, and you're gold. If you have to deal with the jumpers, however, you've got a chore for yourself. To change the computer's settings using jumpers, you are going to need your motherboard manual, or a copy of a jumper map for the particular model of motherboard. Using the jumper maps, determine the proper settings for the wanted processor speed and core voltage. Then move the jumpers on the motherboard so that they match the jumper map. To do this, you may need a pair of tweezers and a pen light. Woo-hoo, congratulations, now your system is overclocked. But wait, that was too simple - what gives? Why did I write this huge guide about overclocking if the steps were easy as 1-2-3? Well, we aren't quite done yet. The next step in this process is to attempt to start up your computer. The first test is seeing whether or not the computer will post. Posting is the process of the computer initializing the BIOS and loading up the system settings. If your computer won't even do this, there is almost no chance you will ever get it to run at the configured speed. Go back and lower the processor speed and try again. If the computer did post, however, but it won't boot up Windows, you may want to try going back and upping the chip's core voltage. Take this as a word of advice though, make sure that you don't raise the core voltage too much - generally no higher than 0.3 V above default. If you go much higher than this, you run a serious chance of permanently damaging your computer. Assuming your computer starts to boot Windows, but crashes before the system begins to settle down, you have two options as to how to deal with the crash. You can either go back and change the system's core voltage or you can add more cooling. That may include adding more case fans, installing a larger and more powerful fan/heatsink combo, or both. At this point, if you are able to do both, you may even be able to reach a higher speed. Ok, your computer boots. Great! But you aren't out of the dark yet, because you still have to check and see if the system is completely stable. BUS, CPU, MEMORY & AGP SPEEDS First, in order to figure out what all this means lets define a few terms. The internal CPU speed refers to the actual speed that the CPU is operating at. When you go to the store or look up system specs you will see, for example, Pentium III 800Mhz. The 800Mhz part refers to the internal operating frequency of the CPU in question. To make this easy just know that is the speed of the processor, 800 Mega-Hertz in this case. The higher the speed (internal CPU clock) of the processor the faster it processes information and the more you can do with your computer in every CPU intensive task. Most newer motherboards have a FSB (Front Side Bus, which will also be referred to as "bus speed") control setting in their BIOS. Abit was the first to popularize this feature with their "SoftMenu" BIOS (see below) that allows bus as well as voltage and other tweaking options to be changed without ever opening the computer's case. With systems like Abit's, there is generally a whole menu devoted to speed and tweaking options designed for overclocking. Menus such as these are increasing in popularity as they
are much easier to use. No matter who makes your mainboard, be it Abit, Asus, Soyo, MSI, most BIOS do offer overclocking features - look out for them :) The bus speed refers to the actual motherboard and it's components. They also run in Mega-Hertz (Mhz) and they all run together at different dividers, or fractions of the CPU speed. Your motherboard has traces on it, if you look down at a motherboard and you see all those long lines running all through it to different components that is the bus of the motherboard, data paths to all the components. The Front Side Bus (FSB) by definition is the bus that connects the processor (CPU) and the main Memory (RAM). The PCI bus is the bus that connects all the PCI devices (connected to the PCI expansion slots), as well as the I/O Controller for your Hard Drive and CD-ROM. The AGP bus is the bus that your AGP video card runs on from the AGP slot. These are the main buses you have to worry about when overclocking. Other types of buses, such as SCSI are also affected by overclocking, but they're beyond the scope of this article, besides they are generally affected by the PCI/ISA bus. How this all fits together: It takes the FSB speed (which is also the RAM speed don't forget) multiplied by the CPU Multiplier to create the CPU Internal Clock speed. For example a FSB speed of 100Mhz times a multiplier of 8 will equal 800Mhz, that is expressed like this: 100 x 8 = 800. Simple as that. The 3 Official FSB speeds currently are 66Mhz, 100Mhz, and 133Mhz. In order to get other bus speeds and try to get different Internal CPU speeds, your motherboard needs to have more FSB option settings, we will go into more detail a little later. Keep in mind when you do overclock the FSB you are overclocking your memory (RAM) so if you have some modules of some slow cheap pieces of memory they may not like to be overclocked at all. If you buy good brand name memory like Corsair, Mushkin, Micron, Infeneon or Samsung, you will have a much better chance at overclocking your FSB. You also need to know the speed in Mhz of the other buses in your PC. This is because when you raise the Front Side Bus (FSB) you are also raising all the other bus speeds. The PCI bus officially runs at 33Mhz, you need to keep it as close to that spec as you can, because overclocking it to high might cause one of your PCI components not to operate correctly. It works like this, in order to get the PCI bus at 33Mhz at a 100Mhz FSB you would use a divider of 1/3 It's expressed like this 100 x 1/3 = 33.3 which is 33Mhz. These divider settings are set in your BIOS, or by jumpers on your motherboard, if at all possible (you might want to check your motherboard's manual for additional info). Now lets say we wanted to raise the FSB to 133Mhz if we kept a divider of 1/3 the PCI bus would be running at 133 x 1/3 = 44.3Mhz this is way too high and devices attached to your PCI bus may not work at this setting. So what do you do? Change the divider setting, most new motherboards that officially support the 133Mhz FSB have a divider setting of 1/4 you can use, 133 x 1/4 = 33.25 or rounded to 33Mhz which is back on spec. The next bus you have to worry about is the AGP bus. The AGP bus, as you recall, is the bus that your AGP Video Card runs off of, so the only device you have to worry about overclocking is the bus that the video card is plugged into. The AGP bus runs at 66Mhz, so no matter what you do when you overclock try to keep it as close to 66Mhz as you can and you won't have any problems with your video card. Now most newer video cards can take a high AGP bus setting, I've seen some go as high as 100Mhz and most make it to 88Mhz but for first time overclockers I recommend that you try to keep it as close to 66Mhz as you can. The AGP bus uses dividers just like the PCI bus. At a 100FSB you have to use a divider of 2/3 it's expressed like this 100 x 2/3 = 66.6 or 66Mhz. If you were to raise the FSB to 133 and keep the 2/3 divider you would have an AGP bus of 133 x 2/3 = 88Mhz. In order for it to get back to normal you would have to use a divider of 1/2 now this is a problem on all Intel BX chipset motherboards because they only go up to a 2/3 divider, there is no 1/2 divider, and anything over the 100Mhz FSB speed will mean overclocking the AGP bus speed as well. Again, when increasing your FSB speed, you'll also have to consider all the other devices in your system. Just because the CPU runs stable at the higher speed settings doesn't mean you have overclocked successfully. Any of the other devices can stop functioning or start causing problems. You might need to edit your CMOS and lower some of the settings for the RAM and/or Hard Drives to get your system functioning without problems. It is a fact that by overclocking you increase the chances of system faults, crashes and overall instability, so if avoiding a crash is crucial, consider buying faster Processor or components, rather than overclocking. Just remember for reference: PCI Bus = 33Mhz AGP Bus = 66Mhz FSB x Multiplier = CPU Internal Clock Speed FSB x Divider = PCI or AGP Bus Speed Effect of non-standard bus speeds Non-standard bus speeds can have a variety of effects on various types of computer hardware. Hard drives can miswrite data, CD writers can create even more coasters than usual, CD-ROM drives can refuse to function, RAM can refuse to work properly, etc., etc., etc. Some of these problems can be fixed by adding some rudimentary cooling, but many of them are simple limitations of the hardware which will limit a system's overclockability. Keep an eye out for these things because they can cause serious problems with a system. Most of these problems occur when using bus speeds that exceed the PCI bus frequency. PCI is intended to run at 33 MHz. If you set it to ove 40 MHz or so (using 83, 124, or 133+ MHz bus), there is a fair chance your hard drive will lose everything. See page 3 of the Hard Drive Tweak Guide for more information. FSB limitations and agp clock speeds As processor quality increases overclockability, overclockers are finding themselves running Front Side Bus(FSB) speeds that are farther and farther above spec. Ironically, the "old" BX chipset is often the platform of choice for many because it still offers the highest clock-for-clock performance of any other chipset. Often, processors such as the PIII-550e are able to run at speeds in excess of 800MHz. Running at this speed results in an FSB speed often greater than 145MHz. The BX chipset is only designed to run with a 100MHz FSB or lower. When running at its maximum rating of 100MHz, the BX chip only has to divide the FSB by 2/3 to achieve the proper 66MHz operation in the AGP slot. As the FSB increases, this 2/3 multiplier results in higher and higher AGP bus speeds, creating more strain on the video subsystem. At 145MHz FSB, the AGP slot is running at 97MHz!!! That is nearly 150% of the 'rated' speed. Most video cards cannot tolerate this increased speed and will not run. Some of the newest cards, notably the GeForce line from nVidia and the Radeon from ATI, have been able to tolerate this speed on occasion. While running significantly over 90MHz on the AGP bus is still a stretch, a majority of these cards will run the 89MHz bus required to support a 133MHz FSB on the BX platform. This is a much more common overclocked speed, as the BX does support a 1/4 PCI divider, leaving the PCI perfectly in spec (33MHz) while the FSB is at 133MHz. If the AGP card only shows mild instability at the overclocked speed, a small increase in the IO voltage (only supported by some motherboards) can increase stability. If you are having extreme difficulty finding an AGP card to run with a high FSB, or if you want to use a greater than 150MHz FSB, you have
Page 1 and 2:
Mr.X.'s TWEAKING AND OPTIMIZING WIN
Page 3 and 4:
-Msdownld.tmp This one needs manual
Page 5 and 6:
If you have Windows 95/NT you can e
Page 7 and 8:
BootKeys=1 BootMenu=0 BootMenuDefau
Page 9 and 10:
Settings\Cache\History] "CachePath"
Page 11 and 12:
Similarly, open Internet Explorer,
Page 13 and 14:
g - Restart your computer once step
Page 15 and 16:
38. Keep IE crash free Here's a tip
Page 17 and 18:
44. Switch off Dos memory manager D
Page 19 and 20:
Data: D:\WIN95 58. Clear Recent Doc
Page 21 and 22:
Click on the property tab for this
Page 23 and 24:
Right-click in the right hand pane
Page 25 and 26:
By the use of this client software,
Page 27 and 28:
8. Want Real mode DOS back in Windo
Page 29 and 30:
Recommendation: This service will f
Page 31 and 32:
detect and/or recognize your hardwa
Page 33 and 34:
It should almost certainly benefit
Page 35 and 36:
Click start. click settings. click
Page 37 and 38:
Click Analyze, click ok, click Acti
Page 39 and 40:
Nonbrowser. A nonbrowser is configu
Page 41 and 42:
Private IP Addressing (APIPA) for p
Page 43 and 44:
provides protected storage for sens
Page 45 and 46:
If the service is turned off, RIS i
Page 47 and 48:
enables NetBIOS name resolution. Pr
Page 49 and 50:
11. Adaptive Menus Microsoft Office
Page 51 and 52:
3. Speed up Internet Explorer 6 Fav
Page 53 and 54:
Note that in doing this, you are co
Page 55 and 56:
claimed for a ‘fixed’ page file
Page 57 and 58:
When a NTFS drive is formatted it b
Page 59 and 60:
Goto above key in registry and you
Page 61 and 62:
To get Admin account on the "Welcom
Page 63 and 64:
• Security is not opening attachm
Page 65 and 66:
is not acceptable, and that anythin
Page 67 and 68:
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Current
Page 69 and 70:
exists on your NT machine (this key
Page 71 and 72:
- Not found in a dictionary - Not d
Page 73 and 74:
Alt - 119 = w Alt - 120 = x Alt - 1
Page 75 and 76:
Alt - 0166 = ¦ Alt - 0167 = § Alt
Page 77 and 78:
11. Remove the default administrato
Page 79 and 80:
These logs can contain sensitive da
Page 81 and 82:
Right-click in the right hand pane,
Page 83 and 84:
57. Temporarily Assign Yourself Adm
Page 85 and 86:
Install the appropriate post-Servic
Page 87 and 88:
Windows XP Home Edition Configurati
Page 89 and 90:
Caution If your computer is not in
Page 91 and 92: C:\inetpub\ftproot (FTP server) C:\
Page 93 and 94: MBR Work - www.terabyteunlimited.co
Page 95 and 96: Extreme Tech www.extremetech.com Fi
Page 97 and 98: IconFactory.com www.iconfactory.com
Page 99 and 100: Cable Modem Tips http://homepage.nt
Page 101 and 102: _Google _Google Image Search _Googl
Page 103 and 104: Boot other device This feature dete
Page 105 and 106: feature is a little different from
Page 107 and 108: ypass the compensation circuit and
Page 109 and 110: Therefore, using the latest video B
Page 111 and 112: So, for optimal performance, you sh
Page 113 and 114: second clock cycle before sending t
Page 115 and 116: SDRam RAS precharge time This featu
Page 117 and 118: The shorter the delay, the earlier
Page 119 and 120: CPU level 1 cache The modern proces
Page 121 and 122: MPS 1.1 was the original specificat
Page 123 and 124: Please note that even if you don't
Page 125 and 126: Advanced Settings tab of the associ
Page 127 and 128: However, this is not a surefire way
Page 129 and 130: This feature allows you to manually
Page 131 and 132: doubling the bandwidth of the proce
Page 133 and 134: When this feature is enabled, the s
Page 135 and 136: VLink 8X support V-Link refers to V
Page 137 and 138: You will notice that the interrupts
Page 139 and 140: AMD OVERCLOCKING - changing the mul
Page 141: Examples of terminology used You wi
Page 145 and 146: Hard drive limitations Overclocking
Page 147 and 148: 5.0x 500Mhz 560Mhz 620Mhz 665Mhz 5.
Page 149 and 150: If you see copper, you've gone too
Page 151 and 152: "PC" specification that SDRAM uses
Page 153 and 154: Benchmarks allow you to measure you
show all

Tweaking Optimizing Windows.pdf - GEGeek

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?