October 2004
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
7h 44m
English
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Hack #22. Which System Boards Are Hackable?
Read the box and online reviews to determine if your system board might accommodate hacking the system and CPU clock speeds.
Determining if a system board is hackable—that is, whether it supports overclocking of the CPU—is not obvious. Here are some clues to the hackability of a specific board.
Most boards for do-it-yourself system builders, also known as "white box" or generic products, support customizable CPU clock values.
Check the technical specs for support for a range of CPU types and speeds, such as those indicating "AMD Athlon Thunderbird through Athlon XP CPUs," or "1.8-3.3 GHz" speeds. Motherboards thus labeled often provide the ability to change system speed settings.
An Award BIOS is usually a good bet. Most Award BIOS versions implemented by system board vendors provide some parameters to control CPU and bus speeds.
Look for a system board that includes jumpers or switches with obvious marking as to CPU clock frequencies and CPU clock-multiplier settings.
If the motherboard instruction manual mentions selectable CPU clock settings, multiplier values, and/or different Front Side Bus (FSB) frequencies, it's somewhat hackable.
Check the usual sources for information about the hackability of various system board products:
Ask another "PC junkie" for recommendations.
Search Google for "overclock" and your motherboard model.
Browse through overclockers.com, motherboards.org, sysopt.com, tweaktown.com, ocia.net, anandtech.com, pcguide.com, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.