Neuropsychologists aren’t generally required to use physics all that frequently, much less tinker around inside people’s brains (they don’t let us use sharp things you see). So yesterday when I decided to overclock my PC, I went a little bit OTT. This month’s PC Gamer had an article on how even a relatively tame nerd such as myself could go about eking a few extra megaherz from their slightly outdated processor, thus saving a few hundred squids. Several reasons. First off, I tend to work with lots and lots of applications open. This isn’t too much of a problem, but I figured an improvement would be nice. Second, I play a fair few games, and increasingly these seem badly coded and reliant on endless patches, so even my fairly good machine chugs along sometimes. Thirdly, I have heard so many horrific, toe-curling stories about the awfulness of Windows Vista that I’m sure I’m going to upgrade my components later this year instead of buy a new PC. So, time to get my hands dirty.

It’s actually quite straightforward, all you do is go into the BIOS on startup, slowly twiddle the relevant setting up a few points at a time, then see if the computer boots. If it does, find some benchmarking software to see if it’s really faster (I used the performance test in Company of Heroes) Being a scientist, I made extensive notes on what settings I’d entered, how long the machine took to boot up, and the performance ratings.

The downside to speeding things up, is that they generate more heat. Lots of PC components these days have built in temperature sensors that conk out when they get too warm, so put too much strain on any one component and the system will freeze. The two main things to play with are front side bus (FSB, basically affects CPU speed and RAM) and RAM speed. Now because you’re tweaking the RAM speed indirectly via the FSB, you might as well bring the RAM speed right down to avoid problems.

So, everything all ready, I began to tweak. I cranked it up 5%. No boot. Hmm. Cranked it up by 10% just in case, no boot. Then I dropped the RAM speed down and did it again, this time with success! I managed to get everything running about 10% faster, which translated into booting up 20 seconds faster and running the game about 17% faster. It was still a bit bumpy though, so I nipped down to PC world to see what I could do about all the heat in the casing. First thing I did was get one of those cans of compressed air and cleaned up all the rather mucky components of my case from intake fans down to the CPU heatsink. Then I popped another extraction fan in the back, put copper heatsinks on my RAM, and then left the cover off to let it cool down quicker. All this done I managed to get the processor running about 15% faster, and I learnt a fair bit about how my PC is fixed together, ready for the Vista-free upgrade later this year so I can play some fine-looking distractions like Crysis and Bioshock.

Geek on.