My dad's emachine has a Celeron 420(conroe)@ 1.6GHz and it's a little too slow for TF2 but his Emachine won't allow him to overclock via the bios.

I tired software but the slightest change freezes the computer within 30 seconds or BSODs.

So can the pinmod to raise the FSB be done to get a faster clock? Aside from cpu damage can it render the mobo useless? Can I go back to stock settings if it does not work? Will this affect PCI bus speed?

Also I found a guide but it's kind of unclear of exactly what I need to do to the little pads on the bottom of the cpu.

^ Do you have a link to the guide?

Sent you a PM since it won't let me post it here.

^ Then its a censored site...

Anyways pinmods are dangerous... and your better off buying a new motherboard... most OEMs disallow overclocking. Alternativley you could buy a faster CPU such as a Pentium Dual-Core which can be had for about $50 a Core will set you back $120

=)

I wouldn't worry about a pinmod ruining your machine, once upon a time pinmodding was the only way to OC a machine. Do some research and go for it but make sure core temp is loaded because all the safety cut off device on modern units may not be in place.

I would just pick up one of these there are some nice dual core cpu's here for around 70$

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] rder=PRICE

What graphics card is in the machine? TF2 also requires a semi-decent graphics card to run well, as well as an OK CPU.

A very bad X1300 however even at the lowest res it does not play too well and when I put my HD2600XT inside it ran exactly the same for the most part thats why I think more cpu power may be able to squeeze more out of the X1300 and will be needed if he upgrades his graphics card anyway.

The source engine relys heavily on the cpu.

I"ve been researching and somebody did pinmod there cheap board they bought at frys that is the same as the one on the emachine so hopefully all well be ok, I've read like 1000 guides now and understand what must be done with the pins.

This is not always 100% true. I can say so because I tested this out since a lot of people complain about getting low FPS with GPUs like 8800s and such. I used my old system which has a P4P800 mobo, 3.4GHz P4 EE, 2GB DDR400, and a X850XT AGP. I ran TF2 at 1280x1024 (the most common res right now) with everything maxed out including AA/AF. Got about 45FPS average on a good ping server and about 35FPS on a very crappy ping server (damn packet loss). Luckily none of the servers I tested on went below 30FPS.

So in essence his setup should be able to play it fine. In fact he would want to upgrade the CPU first as Source is very CPU limited and TF2 does better with faster CPUs.

I would still suggest a Pentium DC as they are just better. I change my fiances eMachines Celeron 2.7GHz to a Pentium 4 2.8GHz and even though it was just a bit faster (100MHz) and a bit more cache it made all the difference in the world for everything.

That celeron sounds like it's netburst and those sucked beyond belief. Cut the cache off netbursts huge pipeline and that spells disaster.

I think overclocking would give him the upgrade he is looking for in framerate. My Pentium D 3GHz based off netburst plays fine, and afaik the celeron 420 is about as good as a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 so I bet a little more power is going to go a long way.