Dell, Possible to overclock?

[mckinleysh]

Someone told me that Dell and other name brand computers have protection devices on them to keep people from overclocking them, is this true?

 

[mastrcronX]

uh, im not sure what bios dells run on but yea unless you get a windows based program you cant oc em..

 

[pxc]

You need 2 things (at minimum) to overclock: a BIOS or utility to adjust the FSB speed and (sorry to shout) A CLOCK GENERATOR THAT SUPPORTS MINOR FSB STEPS (I.E. 1MHz STEPS).

Many OEM systems (Dell, Compaq, etc) use motherboards that don't cater to the enthusiast crowd, so most of them don't include clock generators that support anything but the only necessary FSB speeds: 100MHz/133MHz/200MHz QDR for Pentium4/Celeron systems, 133MHz/166MHz/200MHz DDR for AthlonXP/Duron and 200MHz QDR for Athlon 64 systems. If you have an OEM system, open it up, find the clock generator chip and look up the datasheet on google. You'll see that you'd mostly be wasting your time unless you can make a large FSB jump with no voltage adjustment. Good luck in most cases.

It's not a conspiracy or even "locking", the companies just mostly use clock generators that are required for the systems and not the tweakable ones that come on enthusiast retail boards. Some systems are the exceptions (Dell 8300/400SC, for example) and you can overclock those systems because they include a tweakable clock generator on board.

 

[RM_Bulldog]

i would search for a good cheap mb and swap out that POS and then enjoy a nice performance gain for the price