OC'ing Notebooks?

[Indiana]

Hello,
anyone knows of a program to overclock a Notebook?
This one is Intel P4 Northwood based and has a ALI chipset in it. The BIOS of course doesn't have any FSB-settings available.

So are there SoftFSB alike tools to raise the FSB under Windows for this?

[Greebe]

I doubt there is a PLL that can be adjusted.

[az]

He could solder a new one on it, couldn't he? Then again, it's not likely there are specs to be found anywhere, plus: Notebooks' cooling systems are often designed for a specific heat output, with not much overhead (due to space, energy consumption, and noise, since a notebook is generally closer to the ear than a tower), so overclocking could lead to SEVERE problems. I believe even if there's something like a mobile module (don't know in which packages/modules/whatever modern notebook CPUs are made), so the CPU would be interchangeable, and even if you could get your hands on a mobile CPU, the cooling system might not be up to the task.

AZ

[Indiana]

Well the Notebooks BIOS has some way to slow down the CPU as this is automatically happening when it's running on battery power. Since this is no mobile CPU, I guess it's doing this by issuing intermitting HALT commands or something like that.

(P.S.: oc'ing the RadeonMobility on this Notebook is very easy: just take Powerstrip and the thing goes up from the default 143MHz to over 200MHz )

[ZokesPro]

Plus notebooks have terrible cooling solutions, even if you could OC it wouldn't be stable.

[thop]

remember more mhz = more juice = less battery life

[DGhost]

i have to agree with greebe... the PLL on the notebook probably cannot be adjusted. if it can, the best bet would probably be to open it and see if there are any dip switches for the processor bus speed...

again, the other warnings apply...

anyways... why the hell do you want to overclock your notebook? isn't that taking it a little far? whats next, the coffee maker?

edit: also, it could be a moble northwood. iirc, the northwood was also the basis of the first P4-M. if it is a P4-M (and your discription of the power savings technology and the proc speed altering itself indicates it is) there is pretty much no chance of overclocking it...

[Umfriend]

Hello,
Anyone have a program to overclock a coffee maker?

Umf

[Indiana]

Battery Power is not the question as I'm mostly using it with the power-plug plugged in.
Heat is not a serious problem until now, might be if I'd be able to oc it. But it would be worth a try, since the oc'ing of the gfx-chip doesn't create any problems whatsoever (but then those newer Radeon mobiles are of course built in a manufacturing process that allows higher clock-speeds, I guess it's really mainly a power-consumption thing that it is clocked that low by default.)

One reason for it: DivX'ing a DVD takes forever and with encoding times of several hours, even a small overclock could probably mean 1/2 an hour of saved time per pass....

[az]

Of course the question arises why you would du number-crunching tasks on a notebook

AZ

[Indiana]

When you don't have anything other, you just have to do it. I don't like carrying my Desktop around that much.

Notbook or not, for sheer computational power and for memory throughput the thing is not different to a DDR based desktop P4-System of a friend of mine - it lacks in aspects like HD-Speed, of course.

/A bit OT:
According to tests at certain sites (cough, THG, cough), the Northwood should be really fast at DivX'ing, but in my experience it isn't (neither the desktop, nor the Notebook). My AthlonXP1800+ based system easily beats those two P4 systems (which deliver roughly the same performance). Still the desktops P4 can be oc'ed easily and without having much heat issues and this helps quite much.

[az]

Maybe there are certain patches, switches or anything that makes DivX use SSE2, or something?

AZ

[Indiana]

DivX 5.02 does use SSE2, but a.) the reference decoder (FPU) seems to give better quality. Needless to say that this is unbearable slow with the P4s incapable x86 FPU unit.
And b.) even when using the P4 enhanced version of DVDx, the P4 still is slower as long as you use high-quality settings.