overclocking is setting your computer to run faster than its stock settings
for instance i'll make this easy by explaining with the original king of overclocking
the AMD 5x86 133
it was a 486 processor with a 4x multiplier on a 33mhz bus
4x33=132
you could increase this processors speed by increasing the bus to 40, or 50mhz
back in these days, you had to do this with jumpers on the motherboard (those little plastic things on the back of IDE hard drives that you change to select Master, or Slave, or Csel)
so if you increased it to 40mhz, you would end up with a 160mhz CPU, thus, overclocking
mhz is the clock rate, overclocking is increasing the clock rate OVER the stock=) get it?
Also this 40mhz would increase the speed of your ram (from 33, to 40mhz)
nowadays you have SO many factors, HT speeds, Memory speeds, HT multipliers, Memory dividers, FSB (front side bus), CPU multipliers, Ram timings,
its much more complicated nowadays, but its really not hard once you sit down and really look at what your doing
in newer computers you can still overclock by increasing the FSB, but you do this in the bios instead of by the jumpers on the motherboard
lets make this next example easy,
lets say for instance, you have an athlon x2 3800+, DDR 400 ram, 200mhz FSB, and HT link of 1000mhz
thats 2000mhz CPU, 200mhz ram (ddr is double data rate, hense the 400), and 1000mhz HT link
in order to overclock your going to need to increase either 1. the CPU multiplier, or 2. the FSB
and with most CPUS the multiplier is locked and it will only go down.
if you increase the FSB, the HT link, and the memory is going to go up with it
so lets say you just kept it simple, and made the FSB 20 mhz faster (220)
the ram is now running at 220mhz, the HT link is 1020, and the CPU is 2200mhz
this setup probably wouldnt work, because most DDR400 ram wont work at 220mhz (most of it maxes out at around 210~215mhz)
so in this instance, you would need to lower the Ram speed divider (somtimes theres an actual fraction in newer motherboards 5/6 or 1/1 yadda yadda), and somtimes in older boards there is just a memory speed setting (100mhz 133mhz 166mhz 200mhz)
the memory speed setting is the same thing as a divider, so in order to increase the core speed to 2200mhz by increasing the FSB to 220, you would need to lower the memory speed to 166mhz (with a final clock of 186 on the memory)
this would give you more overhead to increase the FSB and as a side effect, increase the cpu
Hypertransport is an AMD specific item , and there is Hyperthreading for Intel, but im not sure if it works in exactly the same way, it should be similar
when the HT link gets above 1100~ mhz, in most of these cpus, its unstable,
so when you reach this cap, you would need to lower the HT link multiplier from 5x, to 4x (800mhz instead of 1000mhz)
if your going to overclock, your best bet
is to lower ALL of the settings except for the one that you want to max out
so you would lower FSB, memory, and HT link so that you could see what your core is going to max out at.
this way you eliminate the bottleneck that may have been caused by ram running to fast, or HT link running to fast.
Keep in mind that increasing the speed of these items ALSO increases their heat! you dont want to burn anything up! so you should keep an eye on your temperatures
the effective result of a good overclock, is that you get better framerate (fps) in games, and you get better scores with benchmarks like 3dmark06, or lower times with super-pi
=).. whew.. ...
