HANDS ON GUIDE

Step 1: The FSB

Altering the FSB is at the heart of overclocking any Intel CPU. For the purposes of this article, I'll take you through overclocking a Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU, since providing specific examples will clarify a lot of the abstract theory we've talked about. The techniques mentioned are general, though, and should apply to all Core 2 CPUs, and indeed, any Intel CPU. That said, always remember that YMMV.

Problem alert: Most BIOSes will separate the overclocking controls from more mundane options. A good BIOS will group the overclocking options together, but some are better organised than others, so be prepared to hunt for the options you need. You may also have to contend with some tricky translations – BIOSes are usually written in Taiwan, and different motherboard manufacturers often translate the terms slightly differently.

I used an Asus P5K Premium and, as with the majority of Asus motherboards, the key overclocking controls are located in the ADVANCED section of the BIOS, in the JUMPERFREE CONFIGURATION submenu. (It's called Jumperfree, because 'back in the day', overclocking used to be a process of setting dip-switches and jumpers on the board itself, and Jumperfree was considered to be quite the technological advancement).

Before you start showing the FSB who's boss, there are a couple of quick adjustments that you should make. First, lock the PCI-E speed to 100MHz - you don't want it wandering upwards. Secondly, disable any SPREAD SPECTRUM options. Spread spectrum is a feature that compensates for electromagnetic emissions, which can help if you have an office with hundreds of PCs in close proximity to each other. It has a detrimental effect on overclocking, though, so we want to get rid of it.

The P5K Premium has a lot of overclocking options and, sensibly, it doesn't expose them all right away. To reveal the key controls, you need to change AI to MANUAL. This will then The Q6600 runs at 2.4GHz as standard, and has a 266MHz FSB. This means that it has a clock multiplier of 9, so any FSB value we use will be multiplied by 9 to calculate the chip's speed (2400/266 = 9). Most Core 2 CPUs will happily overclock by a few megahertz without any voltage increase at all, and the same is true of many motherboards, especially those based on Intel's P965, P35 or Nvidia's 680i chipset.

My first step was to set the FSB to 300MHz, which increased the CPU's speed to 2.7GHz. The system POSTed and booted into Windows, but froze almost as soon as it hit the desktop.

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