This isn't a comprehensive guide by any means. I just wanted to help out those who are trying to understand the basic concepts of overclocking. When I was trying to figure it out, it would have helped a lot if I could have found something this thorough (but basic enough for me to understand). I know there are a lot of overclocking questions asked on this board so it might be worth floating.
I'm going to have to do this in two parts because of the maximum character limit of these posts. This turned out to be a lot longer than I thought it would be...
- I'm long-winded but it's broken into titled sections so you can skip to whatever.
- I'll be using examples of AMD CPUs because that is what I'm most familiar with. The concepts are transferable between chip brands, though.
- When I say "OC" I mean "overclock." And when I say "OCing" I mean "overclocking." Likewise, "OCer" means "overclocker." Go figure.
- Remember, this is how I understand overclocking. And I'm not exactly infallible...
Front Side Bus (FSB) A bus is a stream of data between computer components. The Front Side Bus is the main bus of your computer. It determines how fast the information is carried between most of the components connected to the motherboard. A 133 megahertz (mhz) FSB means 133 million clock cycles per second (1 hertz = one clock cycle). That is how many "pieces" of data are being transfered every second . Adjusting the FSB affects any components in the computer that rely on this main bus.
Multiplier An internal variable of the CPU that helps determine the overall speed rating of the chip. The FSB is multiplied by this multiplier to get the final speed of the chip. Adjusting the multiplier only affects the speed of the chip, and nothing else in the computer. It does not affect the FSB speed at all.
DDR An acronym for Dual Data Rate. Originally, the movement of data in and out of storage was executed once per cycle. It would take a whole cycle ...