Oldschool overclock

[Babrbarossa]

A good friend of mine called me today for advice to squeeze a little more out of his northwood 2.0 GHz (in a three or four year old Dell Dimension 4550). I wasn't sore he could get much but after investigating the mobo I discovered that it can go quite a bit higher on the fsb. The problem is that none of the newer temp monitors seemed to be reading his cpu temps, I'm not sure what his max temps are, and we couldn't figure out how to get into his bios (we tried f1, f2, del, esc) but to no avail. Can anyone lend any advice?

[Gav]

Did you try F12? Also make sure there isn't a jumper on the MB that disabled access to the BIOS.

[sswilson]

If it's a dell I strongly doubt you'll be able to do a bios overclock no matter what the mobo is.

Even when they use what appear to be retail mobos, the big box boys usually have their own proprietary bios' which cripple just about everything other than setting the time and date. (Unfortunately you can't just flash the bios to a non-crippled one).

Some (HP & Compaq) even go so far as to write a portion of the bios to the hard drive!

All is not lost though..... once you get into bios, if you find that you are unable to OC from there, you can always try a software OC with something like clockgen.

[Babrbarossa]

Thanks wilson- I found online that the board does have some room to move but, I'm sure what I found referred to the retail version, so you've probably saved us some frustration and confusion.

[sswilson]

Did you find the f-key for getting into bios?

It should say during the post what to press to get into bios.