Stupid question

Thornography

Hey hey,

Just a quick question,

How in the bios can I check if my pc is over clocked?

I bought a pc a few months back, i5 OC'd to 4GHz, But no where
in the BIOS or other places can I see if it is actually at this limit.

Im asking cause it came with a utility to manually overclock it to 3.8GHz
by the click of a button, But I dont wana press the button incase its already
over clocked,

Cheers

Kevster

I would'nt have thought that such a piece of in would be in the BIOS. i believe that the only way you could check what you want is by running a CPU-intensive process and monitoring the clock-speed in real-time. There are programmes to download from the Internet which can monitor the speed, I think.

Antar Bolaeisk

Well right clicking "My Computer" and selecting properties will tell you the rated frequency and current operating frequency of the processor.

Within the BIOS you'd need to enable the advanced controls, the method is different for different brands of motherboards so you'll have to consult the manual, to be able to get acess to the clocking capability of the board. What you want to pay particular attention to is the FSB (although I don't think it's FSB any more for the core i processors) as this directly changes the processor clock rate. You'll need to find out your motherboard details in order to get more information on clocking it though and I'm a bit too rusty to give you much advice.

Also, you should download a program like core-temp to measure the actual temperature of each of the cores on the processor at both idle and stress and a program like orthos to stress test the system. I believe temperatures as high as 60 degrees celcius are acceptable but again someone else will have to confirm or deny this for your particular processor.

Certainly don't just plow and change stuff as there's a very real possibility of damaging something.

Edit: Also, be aware that power saving features in Windows can actively modify the maximum clock speed of the processor regardless of the BIOS settings meaning you could see a lower current processor frequency than what you would be expecting. In this case either change the power saving settings or just run some random program like windows media player or a stress test utility to bring the processor speed out of idle settings.

softdancomputer

CPU-Z