Generally I have always liked to keep my PC running optimally so after reading a number of articles in magazines and newsgroups when I had a P200MMX I decided it was worth the risk of trying to overclock my PC. This was surprisingly effective and very easy to do and resulted in me running my P200MMX at 225Mhz with a noticeable performance increase. However it didn't take long for some of the games I wanted to run to need a significantly faster processor and so with Celerons going very cheaply and motherboards designed to aid overclocking I decided to upgrade, but this time I bought a processor and motherboard with the intention of overclocking immediately. This was also a great success allowing the Celeron 300A I bought to run at 450Mhz with an amazing performance increase. Over the years I have continued to upgrade but now always buy overclockers motherboards to allow me to get that extra bit of perfoirmance. This page contains general information on improving general system performance and information about overclocking your system, TNT class and 3Dfx voodoo cards. Before attempting to overclock any aspect of your system please read the warning below. I have included some benchmarks from my system before and after overclocking my processor and voodoo card.
Overclocking any aspect of your system can cause instability or permanent damage to your system. Overclocking is not a recommended procedure and doing so may void any warranties and technical support is unlikely to be helpful. In short you enter into this at your own risk and I will not be held liable for any damage or loss of data which may occur as a result of using any information below.
General performance configuration for Windows 98/98SE
Right mouse click on the 'My Computer' icon and select 'Properties' select the 'Performance' tab. Click on the 'File System' button and select the 'CD-ROM' tab. Set the 'Supplemental cache size' slider to the highest setting. If you have a quad speed CD-ROM drive or higher set the 'Optimize access pattern' to 'Quad-speed or higher'. From the 'Performance' tab click on the 'Graphics' button. If you have any hardware graphics acceleration set the 'Hardware Acceleration' slider to the maximum value. Also if you hardware 3D acceleration be sure to enable this under DirectX setup which by default is placed in the 'Program Files/directx/setup' folder when installed under Windows 98/98SE.
Ensure that you are not using any 16bit device drivers under Windows 98/98SE/ME
Right mouse click on the 'My Computer' icon and select 'Properties' select the 'Performance' tab. If everything is OK it will tell you that your system is configured for optimal performance. If this is not the case check under the 'Device Manager' tab for any conflicts etc. and try to obtain updated drivers from your hardware vendor.
Control the number of programs started automatically when you load Windows 98/98SE/ME
The number of utilities that are in the system tray and run from Windows startup can have a significant affect not only on the initial time Windows takes to load but also on system resources. Therefore it is best to limit the number of utilities that you run when Windows starts. Not all applications started by Windows are in the start menu's startup folder (Start->Programs->StartUp) but are run from a variety of locations in the Registry. These can be disabled by using the MSConfig utility which can be accessed from the run menu. There are also a number of Freeware programs which perform this function and often provide a little more flexibility. I have only tried one such utility and as it worked flawlessly I have never bothered to download an alternative. The program is Startup Manager which allows you to disable or remove entries from both the StartUp folder and the Registry and is quite small and intuitive.
If you have 128Mb RAM or less
Unfortunately the best advice is to upgrade to 128Mb or more. I would recommend a minimum of 128Mb for Windows 98/98SE/ME and 256MB for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. If you wish to work with graphics or video I would recommeend at least 512Mb of RAM as this upgrade that will give you a significant performance increase. In general I would say as RAM is relatively cheap nowdays aim for the 512MB mark regardless as a minimum. If you are using an old Socket 7 board based on the Intel Triton chipsets FX, VX and TX any memory above 64MB is not cached which will significantly slow down the system by a magnitude of approximately 30%. These old systems can still be used for simple word processing, e-mail and web browsing but your best bet is to upgrade if you want to do anything else. However if like me you have your old system lying around then there is no harm putting it to use e.g. as a firewall..
If you have 32Mb RAM or more and Windows 98/98SE
Right mouse click on the 'My Computer' icon and select 'Properties' select the 'Performance' tab and click on the 'File System' button. From the 'Hard Disk' tab change the typical role of your computer to 'Network Server'. Unfortunately the names of these options are not representative of what they are actually for and this will buffer more items in your RAM thus increasing system performance.
Hard disk defragmentation and error checking
Regularly run Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter on your hard disk in order to ensure that it performs optimally.
If you have a modem slower than 56K
Unfortunately this is now a relatively slow modem and if you use it to browse the web etc. then you should upgrade to a 56K modem. If you go for a 56K modem make sure it supports the V92 standard as this has superceeded the V90 standard or can be upgraded by a free flash ROM upgrade and that the upgrade is freely available.
General dial-up modem performance settings on Windows 98/98SE
From 'Control Panel' double click on 'Modem'. Select your modem from the list and click on the 'Properties' button. From the 'General' tab ensure that your 'Maximum Speed' is set to the maximum throughput value for your modem. Select the 'Connection' tab and ensure that 'Connection Preferences' are set to 8-none-1. Click on the 'Port Settings' button. If you have a 16550 UART ensure the sliders for the receive and transmit buffers are at there maximum settings. From the 'Connection' tab click on the 'Advanced' button. Ensure that the 'Hardware (RTS/CTS)' flow control is selected and that under error control 'Compress data' is selected.
Improving Internet connection performance using Dial-Up Networking (DUN)
Apparently by default Windows 98/98SE is configured to run over a LAN by changing the MaxMTU and RWIN settings in the registry performance can be improved. The actual effects of this are a matter of contention. I personally believe it increased the throughput of my connections or at least pages seemed to appear faster. All I can say is try it at best you will see an improvement and if not you can always revert to the original values. To change these values I suggest you use a program such as MTUSpeed which will perform the registry changes for you with a decent front end. This is not necessary with Windows ME, 2000 or XP as these are already optimally configured for each connection type.
BIOS Settings
There may be a number of settings in your BIOS that will allow you to change the timing used for your RAM and access modes for your hard drive. Changing some of these may improve performance. You will need to consult your motherboard manual for details on what settings are available. Programs such as TweakBIOS allow you to change a number of settings available in your motherboard's chipset some of which will not be available from the BIOS setup menus to further tweak your chipset.
Processor Optimisation
Various utilities are available to help tweak the setups of various processors. A couple of good places to start looking for these are Tom's Hardware Guide and The System Optimisation - PC Hardware and Performance Guide site.
Swap File Optimisation
If you have the space to spare taking control of the windows swap file will generally improve the performance of your machine and stop that irritating disk thrashing that occurs each time windows decides to resize your swap file. To set a fixed swap file you will need to right mouse click on the 'My Computer' icon and select 'Properties' select the 'Performance' tab and click on the 'Virtual Memory' button. Select 'Let me specify my own virtual memory settings' and select a drive for the swap file. Enter the values for the minimum and maximum size for your swap file. Generally it is recommended to set your minimum and maximum values to the same value so that the swap file does not resize. A rough guide to the size required is 2.5 times your physical memory e.g. If you have 128Mb RAM set the minimum and maximum values to 320Mb and if you have 256Mb RAM set the minimum and maximum to 640Mb. If you can place the swap file on its own partition on a seperate drive preferably the fastest partition near the start of the drive this will again improve performance and reduce disk fragmentation problems. Placing it on the first partition on the same drive as the OS also seems to give an improvement in my experience.
Disk Cache Optimisation for Windows 98/98SE/ME
The dynamic management of the disk cache in Windows 95 was terrible. This was improved in Windows 98 and improved significantly in Windows 98SE to the point that opions on whether the tweak below was still needed were divided. I personally came to the conclusion that when running Win98SE this was no longer needed but others swore by it. . Windows will often take most of your free physical memory for the disk cache and then not release it when a program requires it thus causing slower virtual memory to be used. This can be avoided by limiting how much memory windows can use for the cache. To do this enter 'minfilecache=<size>' and 'maxfilecache=<size>' where size is in kilobytes in the 'vcache' section of your 'system.ini' file which can be found in your 'Windows' directory. If the 'vcache' section does not exist then create it. The maximum cache size should ideally be no less than a quarter of your physical memory. In a system with 128Mb of physical memory use the following settings.
[vcache]
minfilecache=4096
maxfilecache=32768
A more flexible and user friendly way to achieve this is to use a utility such as Cacheman which will insert the relevant lines for you and supports a number of profiles for various cache settings. I would thoroughly recommend this program.
CD-ROM Cache Optimisation
Within Win 98/98SE it is only possible to optimise your CD-ROM cache for drives up to quad speed (4x). However since this restriction was originally placed in Win 95 and for reasons best known to Microsoft carried over to Win 98 CD-ROM speeds have increased significantly to such an extent that quad-speed drives are now very slow. It is possible to optimise the CD-ROM cache for faster drives by either editing the registry or using a utility such as TweakAll. Unless you feel comfortable editing the registry I would suggest you use a utility such as the one previously mentioned as errors in the registry can stop windows from loading. To edit the registry run 'regedit' and select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\CDFS. The keys which control the cache size and optimisation pattern are 'CacheSize' and 'Prefetch' respectively. If you have previously set the CD-ROM cache in windows to 'quad-speed or higher' 'CacheSize' and 'Prefetch' will have the following values when converted to decimal 619 and 228 respectively. Adding 25 (equivalent to 50Kb) to these values increases the optimisation pattern by the equivalent of a 1x speed drive. The amount of memory in kilobytes represented by these numbers can be found by multiplying them by 2 e.g. at quad-speed 619 represents 1238Kb of memory for the cache size and 456Kb for the prefetch size.
The following table shows the registry settings for the most common speeds of CD-ROM up to 32x drives.
| 4x | 8x | 12x | 16x | 24x | 32x | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CacheSize | 619 | 719 | 819 | 919 | 1119 | 1319 |
| Prefetch | 228 | 328 | 428 | 528 | 728 | 928 |
The following graph shows the cache and prefetch sizes in kilobytes for the most common speeds up to 32x CD-ROM drives.
I used SiSoft Sandra 99 Standard to benchmark my AOpen DVD-9632 (6x DVD 32x CD-ROM) DVD-ROM drive.I used three disks for all the benchmarks. A DVD Movie disk containing a 1024Mb file, aa DVD Data disk containing a 97Mb file and a CD Data disk containing a 192Mb file. These benchmarks are very basic and simply show the results for each speed, each test was only run once and so does not cater for variation in results which would be seen over multiple results. Also I only tried the basic speeds as set out in the table above and did not try larger cache sizes with lower prefetch settings or smaller cache sizes with higher prefetch settings which may provide better results. The results were not entirely conclusive and resulted in me settling for a optimum speed in my system of 12x. This result is only really valid on my system and could differ if different test disks were used.
How processor clock speeds are derived.
When Intel or anybody else for that matter make a batch of CPU's they test some of them at the highest setting they wish to sell that line at and if any fail they then test them at the next lowest speed. This process continues until all those tested run correctly. For example a batch of Pentium processors will be tested at 2Ghz, if some fail they will then be tested at 1.8Ghz and so on until a speed is found at which they run correctly at which point the entire batch is graded at that speed. So in the above example they all ran correctly at 1.5Ghz the entire batch would be rated at that speed. To complicate matters further as there is generally a greater demand for lower rated chips than the more expensive higher rated chips and the general high quality of the chip fabrication plants, even if chips pass at the highest speed they may still be sold at a lower rating to meet demand. Therefore it is quite possible that the CPU in your system is actually perfectly OK at a higher speed.
Processor Chip Generations
When AMD and Intel release chips they usually release them based around a certain core all of which will be manufactired with a process often described by the CPU's die size e.g. 13nm (nanometer) die. Chips with the same die size and core are of the same generation. As they change cores and die sizes the performance of these chips generally increase hence the maximum achievable speed is often determined by the chips generation. Chips made with the same core and die size can potentially reach a certain maximum speed before becoming unstable. This maximum differs from generation to generation.
Successful Overclocking
In general you will usually overclock your system by increasing the multiplier and/or system bus. usually it is a combination of these that determines your CPU speed and overall system performance. The key to successful overclocking is to be sensible and only to overclock components a step at a time. Fortunately most overclocking attempts don't instantly result in burnt out chips or boards. If there is a problem your system may not boot or will crash more frequently. If that is the case simply reverse the last change and you should be OK. Some chips are generally more suited to overclocking than others, examples of these have included the Intel celeron, Intel Pentium 2 & 3 and AMD Duron and Athlon series, only overclock your processor within the range of chips covered by the generation of your processor.
The Multiplier
When most people think of overclocking they think of increasing the CPU multiplier normally the difference between different ly rated chips in a range is the multiplier's value. Increasing the multiplier is generally quite easy and at worst will usually involve changing a few jumpers on your motherboard. Unfortunately both AMD and Intel have produced chips with locked multipliers. In the case of the AMD Athlon chips it is possible to unlock the multiplier but it is a slow and delicate process which if done incorrectly could seriously damage your CPU and/or motherboard. For more information on unlocking the Athlon see this guide at ClubOC. Overclocking the CPU can cause it to run hotter and it may be necessary to improve the cooling system for your CPU and case.
The System Bus
The speed a CPU runs at is determined by the system bus speed and the multiplier. Therefore by increasing your bus speed you can increase your overall system performance and the speed your processor is running to come up with some weird and wonderful speeds. Increasing the bus speed generally improves the entire system performance as you may be overclocking your memory, CPU, PCI boards and possibly motherboard chipset simultaneoulsy. Changing your bus speed can be more effective than increasing your multiplier settings and if you have a multiplier limited CPU then this is the only way to overclock your system. The ability to overclock the system bus will depend entirely on your motherboard and some motherboards provide more support for this than others.One thing to remember is that when overclocking the FSB the PCI and AGP dividers may need to be changed in order to run these closer to the specification. Many cards do not like operationing to far outside the standard speeds. If you have problems overclocking you may consider increasing the voltage to the CPU on the motherboard. Increasing the voltage will cause your CPU to get hotter and it may be necessary to consider more powerful fans, better heat sinks and additional case fans. The average temperature of your CPU can be lowered by running a soft cooler such as AMN Refrigerator, CPUIdle, Waterfall Pro or VCool this is a program which issues HLT instructions when your CPU is idle which causes it to use less power during idle periods. In the case of the Athlon and Duron the HLT instruction isn't sufficient to place the CPU in idle mode and it must disconnect itself from the system bus before it can power down. This is acheived by altering the internal setup of the processor to allow it to disconnect and this is done by programs such as VCool which I mentioned previously. If you are running Win 98/98SE or ME with ACPI enabled, Win NT/2000/XP or Linux then this is done by the operating system an extra software isn't necessary except in the case of the athlon where the Bus Disconnect Enable bit has to be set. Some motherboards allow you to monitor the temperature of some of your components and using a program such as Motherboard Monitor or MBProbe can give a clear indication if your system is running too hot.
In the case of Intel chips it is often worth checking the fabrication plant and production week of your chip. The general consensus on the Net appears to be that chips from Intel's Malaysia plant are generally more overclockable than their Costa Rican equivalents and that certain production weeks have a greater success of overclocking. details of these can be found on many sites on the Web. If your buying an Intel chip, try to buy a retail boxed version as these are generally considered to be more overclockable. If you want information about a certain production week or other general overclocking related topics it is worth checking the alt.comp.hardware.overclocking Usenet newsgroup.
If you are buying a motherboard and plan to overclock or even just think that you may want to upgrade to a future unreleased CPU then consider buying a board which allows settings such as the FSB speed, voltage etc. to be set via the BIOS as overclocking becomes even easier as you don't even have to open the case and fiddle around with jumpers or switches to change the settings. Manufacturers well known for producing overclockers boards include Abit, Asus and MSI
People really started overclocking their graphics cards in large numbers with the release of the original 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics card significant speed increases could be gained by editing the autoexec.bat file in windows. The settings below where those I used to overclock my original Voodoo 3D accelerator card which at the time gave me a 41% speed increase in GLQuake. This card is still in one of my old PCs today to provide support for a couple of classic games which did not support Direct3D, Longbow 2 and EF2000.
SET SST_SCREENREFRESH=60 SET SST_GRXCLK=57 SET SST_FASTMEM=1 SET SST_FASTPCIRD=1 SET SST_SWAP_EN_WAIT_ON_VSYNC=0 SET FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=0 SET FX_GLIDE_NO_SPLASH=1
The above variables change the following aspects of the voodoo chipset.
SST_SCREENREFRESH This sets the screen refresh rate. Valid values are 60, 75, 85 and 120Hz.
SST_GRXCLK This is the overclocking bit. Values greater than 57 may lead to unstability.
SST_FASTMB Enable/disable EDO timing.
SST_FASTPCIRD Enable/disable fast PCI read option.
SST_SWAP_EN_WAIT_ON_VSYNC Turn on/off the vertical sync.
FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL Enable/disable buffer swapping
FX_GLIDE_NO_SPLASH Enable/disable 3Dfx logo on switch to 3D.
The above changes only affect Glide/OpenGL software if you wish to overclock your voodoo card for Direct 3D software then you will need to edit the registry. To do this run the 'regedit' program and go to the following entry :-
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/3Dfx Interactive/Voodoo Graphics
Add a new DWORD entry called 'SST_GRXCLK' with a decimal value of '57'.
Similar tweaks to the one above exist for the Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee and can be found on various web sites.Various tweaking utilities also exist for Voodoo chipset based cards which allow their settings to be optimised and overclocked such as V.Control, Banshee Control, Voodoo 2 Tweaker, Voodoo 3 Tweaker and Voodoo 5 Overclocker along with others which can be downloaded from sites such as Voodoo Files and KoolSmoky
Today most graphics cards can be overclocked often by settings in the cards drivers. If your using NVidia Reference drivers of manufacturers drivers which are usually just re-badged reference drivers then a lot can be optimised before considering overclocking. Full details of the tweaks which can be applied can be found on the web at sites such as TechSpot and Tweak 3D. I would recommend trying these as they provide a noticable performance boost.
There are a number of utilities to help in overclocking both NVidia and ATI chipset based graphics cards> To overclock and tweak NVidia cards (also supports ATI cards now) I would recommend RivaTuner another NVidia only option is NVHardPage, To overclock ATI cards there's ATITool and Rage3D Tweak . Finally a general overclocking tool which covers most brands of card is PowerStrip but unlike the others mentioned this is not a freeware product.
When tweaking, optimising, overclocking or upgrading parts of your system it is a good idea to take a few benchmarks before and after so that you can determine if there has been an improvement. There are numerous tools available to help with this taskwhich can roughly be divided into two main camps, pure benchmarking utilities and ganes which allow you to run demos as benchmarks. The former category includes tools such as SiSoft Sandra, AIDA32, 3DMark and AquaMark. The latter category includes the Unreal series of games, the famous Quake Series Time Demos for which setup details are described below and many others. Some of these benchmarks are more general system benchmarks whilst others tend to concentrate on the abilities of your graphics card.
Quake 1 Time Demo
This is now a very old benchmark and wont challenge any of todays hardware but if you do have an old Voddoo 1/2, Riva or TNT 1or 2 class card floating about it may still be of some use. In order to run this benchmark you will need a copy of Quake v1.06 and GLQuake 0.97 which can be downloaded from id Software. The demo can also be used for benchmarking.
To run the Quake benchmark perform the following steps:
Quake 2Time Demo
This is also a very old benchmark and wont challenge any of todays hardware but if you do have an old Voddoo 2, Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo 3, TNT 2 or Geforce 256 class card floating about it may be useful. In order to run this benchmark you will need a copy of Quake 2 patched to v3.20 which can be downloaded from id Software. The demo can also be used for benchmarking..
To run the Quake 2 benchmark perform the following steps:
Quake 3 Time Demo
This is a relatively recent benchmark and will still challenge reasonably current hardware so if you have a Voodoo 5, Geforce 2, 3, 4, FX or Radeon class card this is the Quake demo to run. In order to run this benchmark you will need a copy of Quake 3 Arena patched to v1.32 which can be downloaded from id Software. The demo can also be used for benchmarking..
To run the Quake 3 Arena benchmark perform the following steps:
To run the demo in a loop perform the lfollowing steps:
In Quake III Arena\baseq3 directory create a file called 'demo.cfg' containing
the following lines:
timedemo 1
Set D1 "demo demo127; set nextdemo vstr D2"
Set D2 "demo demo127; set nextdemo vstr D1"
vstr D1
To start the dem replace step 6 above with the following command::
exec demo.cfg
Benchmark Results
The following graphs show some results from running a Quake 1 and a Quake 2 time demo before an after I overclocked some of my previous systems. As you can see asignificant performance increase was acheived in each case.
