1.1 Introduction

Overclocking. For one it’s a sport, for another it’s a way to increase the performance of the PC. Overclocking is actually no more than letting the hardware components run on a higher speed than the stock speeds. Depending on the product that you want to overclock, there are several ways to do it.

One thing that is impermeable connected to overclocking is cooling; electric components have the quality to get warmer as they go faster. Only by cooling the CPU (Central Processing Unit) or GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) as best as possible, the die-hard overclockers are able to get their rigs to go extreme. Luckily for the normal people in this world, we don’t have to go all exotic with cooling solutions like water cooling or Peltier cooling or even more extreme like the usage of liquid carbon dioxide as most manufacturers keep a margin in the stock speed which the chips are running and the max speed the chip can run on. This lets us increase the performance without using extreme cooling.
The experts will find this article less interesting. But so, this article is not written for the pros.
To all the others, that are not/less experienced, you should read this article. I will explain to you by hand of this article how to overclock an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600.

1.2 Front Side Bus and Multiplier

Overclockers have the tendency to use the codename of the CPU instead of the official name. You won’t hear the term Core 2 Duo a lot in the OC-community. Instead, they talk about the “Conroe� which is the codename for the Core 2 Duo.

The Core 2 Duo (Conroe E6600) works standard on a clock frequency of 2.4GHz or 2400MHz. The clock frequency of the CPU is always the result of the so-called “Multiplier� and the clock frequency of the FSB (Front Side Bus), the connection between the CPU and the motherboard. The Core 2 Duo CPUs are working on a FSB of 266MHz and the E6600 has a multiplier of 9x. So the actual clock frequency is 9 x 266 = 2400MHz.

Most of the readers will ask themselves why the front side bus isn’t 1066 MHz, as Intel proclaims. This is easy to explain; Intel’s front side bus is so-called “quad-pumped� which means that during each clock cycle, there can be 4 times the data transfer than normal. And because of this reason; the front side bus is 4 x 266 = 1066 MHz.

Since the clock frequency the result is of MP and the FSB, you can overclock it by increasing the frequency of one of these two. It’s this simple. Almost all CPUs, with exceptions of the Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme and the AMD’s Athlon 64 FX chips, have a certain MP value. With the Core 2 Duo that I am using today, it’s possible to reach a higher multiple(multiplyer) than 9x.

1.3 Increasing the FSB

The overclocking of a (Core 2 Duo) processor is simply to increase the FSB frequency. For example; when you increase the FSB from 266MHz to 300MHz, the CPU will run on 300 x 9 = 2700MHz. In this case, you can also say that the FSB is running on 300 x 4 = 1200MHz.

1.4 Motherboard

The conditions needed for a successful overclock are that the motherboard has to support the opportunity to increase the FSB and also the usage of overclockable memory. To check whether a motherboard is suitable for overclocking, you not only need to check the options to increase the FSB, but mainly the layout of the motherboard and the usage of components on the motherboard. As with normal motherboards with mainly lesser components, the overclock will not be as high and stable as with the usage of a motherboard with high quality components.

1.5 Memory

The speed of the memory is connected to the front side bus and there is a ratio between the speed of the memory and the front side bus. For example; when you set the memory to run on 800Mhz, the ratio will be 2:3. This is quite complicated and I will try to explain it: DDR (Double Data Ram) means that with each clock cycle, there will be 2x the data transfer than normal. This means that a DDR2-800MHz module actually works on 400MHz. This 400MHz is compared to the 266MHz FSB of the CPU a 3 to 2 ratio.

To gain the maximal benchmark results, it’s better to run the memory and CPU on a 1:1 ratio. This means that with the usage of a standard non-overclocked E6600, the memory needs to run on 533MHz. The higher the overclock is of the CPU, the higher the overclock will be for the memory.

It’s wise to use DDR2-800 (DDR2 PC6400). This memory allows you to overclock the front side bus until 400MHz without overclocking the memory so you can maintain the 1:1 ratio. With our E6600 CPU, this means that we can reach a maximum of 400MHz x 9 = 3600Mhz while still running 1:1 with the memory.

Here are some samples how to calculate it:

Stock:
266 FSB x 4 = 1066MHz front side bus
266 FSB x 9 = 2400MHz CPU clock frequency
266 FSB x 2 = 533MHz memory clock frequency

Overclocked:
300 FSB x 4 = 1200MHz front side bus
300 FSB x 9 = 2700MHz CPU clock frequency
300 FSB x 2 = 600 MHz memory clock frequency.

If you understand the calculation method, then you can start the overclock.

To be continued…