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Now comes the tedious but none the less important part of overclocking. The computer is running stable at the new and improved speed, but we are not done yet. There is so much more to good performance then just revving up the cpu. We need to benchmark other subsystems (memory, hard drive, video card) to maximize their performance. There are many bench marking programs out there. One that is very popular and, that I use is SiSoft Sandra. This will benchmark the various parts of your system. This allows you to track how changing various BIOS settings and/or drivers effects your system. Your goal is to get everything running at its highest efficiency. In the case of my system that meant setting the memory to run at 133MHz rather than 100MHz and setting it to four-way interleave and CAS-2. Hard drive performance was maximized by placing the boot drive (IBM 45GB) on the ATA-100 promise controller channel and updating the firmware and drivers. Video performance was maximized by overclocking the video card and updating the drivers. Finally you have to make certain the system is stable. What good is your overclocked system if it can barely boot into windows? This means that you must stress the system and let it run for hours on end. My preferred method is to run Seti@Home. This will keep your CPU running at 100%. Then run a game like Quake (while seti is running) if it survives this then its fairly certain to be a stable system. |