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Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

One very amusing thing I see all the time on USEnet is overclockers talking about all the calisthenics they have to go through to get the speed increase to take. One of the adjustments that is often made to compensate for the way overclocking disturbs the normal timing of circuits in the PC, is to change components with tight timing and/or disable BIOS settings to get the system to work.

I've seen people who had to replace their system memory, drop the PIO mode down on their hard drives, change their video card, and disable a significant number of performance-enhancing features in their BIOS setup, just to get the system to boot up overclocked. After a certain point you have to ask yourself: why bother?

I saw one gentleman triumphantly proclaim that he got the 75 MHz bus going on his PC but in order to get it to work, he had to drop the memory timing on the system to the slowest level possible and lower his hard disk from PIO mode 4 to PIO mode 2. Frankly, the system was probably running faster before he started. If you have to take this many dramatic steps backward to overclock your system, you're just wasting your time.

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