Build your own laptop

Posted at: Tuesday 1st August 2006 by James Morris

James Morris shows you how to custom-build your own performance laptop without spending a fortune

However, we had considerably more success with overclocking the other laptop, and adding the CoolBits registry entry (www.pcextreme.net) to the ForceWare driver allowed us to overclock the GeForce Go 6200 graphics chip. This was set at 300MHz for the GPU and 600MHz for the memory as standard, but CoolBits' Detect Optimal Settings button managed to bump these up to 380MHz and 760MHz respectively. With these settings, the 1.6GHz Celeron M marginally improved its Far Cry frame rate, although not enough to be playable at a higher resolution or with extra quality enabled. The Pentium M, in contrast, became playable at 1,024 x 768 with no AA or AF, although it was still a little too sluggish to go beyond 640 x 480 with 2x AA and 2x AF enabled.

More fun was still to come, however, as we then tried using SysTool and ClockGen to increase the CPU frequency. Although the former seemed only capable of locking up the operating system, ClockGen gave us full control over the FSB using the ICS954148 PLL setting, although we had to check the Ignore GSB/PCI box. Using ClockGen, we pushed the 1.6GHz Celeron to 2.1GHz before it refused to go any higher. Revealingly, this was where the FSB went over 133MHz. The overclock had a phenomenal effect on the Media Benchmarks, lifting the overall score by 22 per cent to 0.61. However, we found that combining this with the graphics overclock resulted in instability, so we had to relax the CPU a little to 2GHz. This had the required effect on gaming performance, making Far Cry smooth enough at 800 x 600, although again without AA or AF. It's also worth noting that when we switched to the less intensive Volcano level, which scales much more with CPU speed than the Fort level, the game was still playable even at 1,024 x 768.

Our success with the Celeron M was mirrored with the Pentium M, which we managed to push to 2.3GHz stably using a 153.5MHz FSB. This bumped up the Media Benchmarks score by 14 per cent to 0.95, making it the overall fastest of our laptops in 2D. However, we had to relax the overclock slightly to 2.25GHz to achieve stability when combining it with the graphics frequency increases. The improvements weren't that noticeable in 3D, though, implying that the graphics were the limiting factor in this configuration.

We managed to push things too far once or twice, though. You'll notice that laptops miss one regular element of a desktop: a reset button. While holding your finger down on the power button can achieve the same effect, it doesn't always work, so your last-ditch option is to unplug the power and uncouple the battery. We had to resort to this method on a number of occasions but, gratifyingly, the laptop was resuscitated once the power was restored. Fortunately, when using software overclocking utilities such as ClockGen, unless you corrupt your hard disk or damage your hardware, your overclocked setting will have been forgotten when the system reboots.