I've been getting back into the overclocking scene recently. I intend building and overclocking PC's for a small service I'm setting up. I noticed that my desktop computer blows out very cold air, so naturally my first thoughts were "Hey lets do this!". Its already overclocked in the Bios, but due to picky memory timings its prone to breaking if its not at the
exact settings I have it at now. In essence the machine wont even turn on unless its overclocked, I've already made a post about it, I might just make a write-up sometime.
I tried
SetFSB, did a little research into how it worked. You must run it every time the computer is powered off (soft resets don't count as powering off), it modifies the motherboards
PLL, or at least what the computer sees of the PLL. Changing the PLL allows the motherboards bus speed to run faster, and therefore the CPU essentially pushing it harder and overclocking both. I set it up for my motherboard (Intel Bad Axe II), messed around a bit, and managed to software overclock it further to 3.2ghz. Everything is air-cooled, it runs stable for a while at 3.3ghz but soon overheats.
Now to move onto my laptop. The problem with laptops is, you don't know what make/model the motherboard is. Surprisingly
Everest says the motherboard is custom, its name being "Toshiba Qosmio X300". The PLL isn't in the Set FSB list. Many forums have been telling people to go to the chip manufacturers website and petition for the release of the PLL datasheet. The Qosmios PLL chip is the SLG8SP556V made by Sliego ("petition"
here).
People have been going crazy trying to overclock this laptop. To the point where "I've tried all the PLLs in the list, none of them work". Which I can attest is bullshit. I went through the list, did a search for SLG8SP556V, deleted the end letters slowly and found the next closest match, the SLG8SP513V (Samsung R70). Sure enough, that PLL works perfectly.
So download
Auto SetFSB, set it up and use the Samsung R70 PLL with Auto SetFSB. Use Everest to find out the base frequency of your CPU and the max multiplier. Being a lazy fucker, I added 200Mhz to my base frequency and tried that. If you want to be more specific you can do a binary search for the max frequency that doesn't result in a blue screen, and bench mark it. Reduce the frequency if it crashes on the benchmarks. Mines never overheated, but you can feel the heat increase significantly.
As a follow up, I recommend you try out
DOX Optomised Drivers and if possible you can install
nTune and push your GPU harder. I haven't tried the latter yet. nTune was developed for nForce motherboards, but apparently it can overclock your GPU regardless if as long as it's an nVidia card. If anyone else tries this, let me know how things went. Unlike the stories I've heard, my Qosmio has
never overheated (unless you count that time I wrapped it up in a towel and used it as a baking tray), but if your laptop overheats often, maybe overclocking isn't wise. Enjoy your overclocked Qosmio.
