The art of overclocking has been around a long time, but it’s constantly evolving. Whereas only a few years ago you needed to replace jumpers on the motherboard to get access to a few pre-defined front side bus (FSB) frequencies, today’s motherboards can generate hundreds of frequencies from the BIOS setup program without changing the speeds of other components. And now you don’t even need to do it through the BIOS setup—software exists that lets you overclock from within the operating system itself.
Lots Of Software
In this article, we’ll tell you about a number of different applications that let you overclock your processor, as well as your graphics card. Some of them can even change memory frequency and timings. Obviously, you use software like this at your own risk, but if you stay within reasonable limits, there’s not that much danger of damaging your hardware—and the benefit in extra performance is quite often substantial.
- Introduction
- Two Favorites: CPU-Z And GPU-Z
- For The CPU: SetFSB
- Motherboard Utilities
- nTune and OverDrive: Overclocking With AMD and Nvidia
- Memset: For Memory Optimization
- Overclocking Made Easy: Drivers
- For Nvidia/AMD Graphics Cards: RivaTuner
- PowerStrip: The Veteran
- ATI Tray Tools And ATITool: Two Different Programs
- Overclock a Netbook? Yes, It’s Possible
- Conclusion

Still, if you have a prebuilt machine with no BIOS overclocking functionality, some of this software is invaluable.
Spot on with RivaTuner and ATI Tool.
Both great apps for overclocking your GPU.
Good work trying to get the masses intrested in overclocking!
"The Cryptographic Subsystem has failed a mandatory algorithm self-test in bootstrap." (Error code 0x000000123)
Forget googling the error code, you'll only find me asking what that means and something else in Chinese.
I don't know if this will help, but I found a couple things regarding the Cryptographic Subsystem:
One article from IBM discusses it as part of their CPUs. The C.S. (Crypto Subsystem) on their chips runs at a certain clock speed.
I'm including the google cache for word reference as well as the original article:
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:3hg9OcIMVpgJ:www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/435/vanhuben.html+Cryptographic+Subsystem+algorithm+self-test&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=us)
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/435/vanhuben.html
Another thing I found was the detail of the C.S. in the patent which is "a secure subsystem to prevent unauthorized
replacement of a storage device containing a boot-up executable code by
establishing a secure path between a secure boot device and a host
processor based on an electronic keying mechanism"
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5937063/description.html
Maybe somehow the C.S. was affected by the O.C. to the boot device?
Only a theory, but I hope the information helps.
There are advantages to overclocking from windows too actually. Other than being lazy that is.
When you're booting your system at an overclocked state, chances are your vrm's can't keep up at powerup for some reason I don't know. So your oc will fail. That I assume is the reason that gigabyte boards shutdown and restart when changing such settings - to avoid the problem.
If you oc from windows, the changes being made are significantly less than from 0 to preset.
Regarding the programs - I have some comments on them. They might be brilliant in some situations, but they don't nessecarily work.
For instance on my work pc, a hp dc7800 with an e6750, setfsb can only read the fsb, it can't set it - no matter which of the 3 types I tried (mmt, slp and the other one). I suspect hp deliberately did something to prevent it from working. So on oem systems you may not find the solution you were looking for in software.
And atitool didn't work very well with my 8800gtx. It could set the gpu and mem speed, but the artefact check isn't able to figure out if the shader speed is too high. So even though it'd run 20 minutes scanning for artefacts in atitool, a 3dmark test would crash at the nature scene when the lights were rendered. So don't rely on the button to automaticly find the best frequency if the shader is linked to the gpu speed.
ps. on all ati hd48x0 cards I've seen so far, the max gpu setting available in overdrive (790 or so) seemed stable - no need to run the check
Besides things like cool'n'quiet and whatever Intels version is (Speedstep?), why would chipset manufacturers even open-up software interfaces for overclocking, when for so many years they were completely against it? Now days anyone can click the "+" in Gigabytes Overdrive and gain a few extra percent. Must make it hard to sell processors in granularities of a couple hundred MHz when you can overcome that through software without any changes to voltage or mupltipliers.
Anyway, good article. Its nice to see the 3rd-party software that can be used, especially if you have no options from the hardware vendor.
My guess is this--your FSB chipset has different timings/subtimings (like ram does) that are invoked when setting the FSB in the BIOS depending on what frequency is set, and these are referred to as "strappings" (I don't know exactly why, but the reference to "bootstrap" in your error code makes me think this is referring to these "strappings")--some timings/subtimings that work at one frequency (one strapping) are too tight for higher frequencies (in another strapping), so as the FSB is changed in the BIOS, a new strapping is used for the new FSB--it might be that when OC'ing your CPU in the BIOS, you got into a regime in your FSB where the timings just don't mesh well for whatever reason (like there's no good set of timings on the FSB), and some errors are encountered relating to the strapping, spitting out that error code. When you OC in windows, the strapping for the FSB initially set in the BIOS is used, regardless of how the FSB is changed in the software (i.e. the timings of the FSB chipset are not changed at all when increasing the FSB in the software since the FSB was not changed in the BIOS at all)--my guess is that the strapping corresponding to the FSB in the BIOS just happens to work better for your clocks, which is counter-intuitive to me, but then again, nothing works exactly like you'd expect... That's my best guess...
+1, but I would change this to "I would NEVER recommend CPU OCing Through Windows". RivaTuner is a Godsend for GPU tweaking.
Spot on! When I saw the picture, I immediately recognized it
I personally don't OC my system because my AM2 6000+ is pretty much at its limits running stock. But if I were to overclock I would certainly give a software OC tool a try.
I remember switching the jumpers on my Shuttle board to make my K6-2 go from 400 mhz to 450 mhz.
I found this article rather redundant. I can see the use for people that are just starting out, but please make sure you READ ALOT of material before doing anything to do with overclocking.
but can you help me?