# CPU Overclocking effect on Graphics Card



## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

I recently purchased a new Alienware M17x. The laptop with the Quad Core Extreme overclockable Processor. Don't discourage me from overclocking my laptop just because I am a laptop user because you will not help me. My question however is that when I overclock my CPU from say 2.53 to 3 GHz, my graphics card seem to play haywire. Recently they have been going more haywire it seems from the overclocks. Even though these graphics cards (Dual 280m's) should run any application without breaking a sweat. When I overclock my graphics in game lag up at certain places and have an almost 5 second slow down where it was as if my graphics cards were in time warp. After decreasing the FSB and multiplier back to normal the same glitches occur randomly. Any suggestions? Do I need to overclock my graphics card as well? Is there something wrong with the timing of the components? Some games are becoming unplayable, which out the box were playable to the utmost level. 

Thanks to anyone who has an answer.


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## Phædrus241 (Mar 28, 2009)

It's probably overheating. It may have overheated to the point of damaging components, though diagnosing it at that would be premature. You might try opening up the laptop and blowing the dust out. But overclocking produces heat, and laptops are not good at heat dissipation.


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

what was it like before you overclocked it?


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

Before I overclocked it, it was perfectly normal, with one glitch here and there. But no to the extent of what it is running at now. If i listen closely to my computer the graphics card literally stop processing for a specfic amount of time which shows up on the LCD as lag. This is a brand new computer basically, i think that there is no need to blow out the dust from the fans. There has to be another explanation. Isn't a simple overclock that is performed supposed to work without any damage to the graphics card? Because it is the graphics card that are stopping to process, not the processor. The cards don't overheat from what i know and have tested. So far the only temperature I have gotten to was about 79 C, whereas the blow-out circuit to shut off the graphics cards are at 105 C. The CPU has not gotten, i would say, above 55-60 C. There has to be another problem. Voltage wise, or RAM, or the processor even. Does it matter whether or not the FSB speed is higher than the multiplier. For example: Running a higher FSB and lower multiplier better than vice versa? Thanks again to anyone who has a suggestion.


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## Phædrus241 (Mar 28, 2009)

> Isn't a simple overclock that is performed supposed to work without any damage to the graphics card?


You've obviously missed the concept of what overclocking is.

When you overclock something, you are _violating its design parameters._ That means that what you are doing is inherently *unsafe*. The card/CPU was designed for a given voltage and clock speed. You are running it at higher than it was designed to. That means that unless the engineers left *really* large safety margins (which is unlikely) any but the slightest of overclocks will shorten the lifespan of the components, and may potentially cause instability. You overclock at your own risk. 



> So far the only temperature I have gotten to was about 79 C


Which is certainly high enough to cause the card to suffer lag and glitches, if not hot enough to cause permanent damage. Usually you start to see performance drops around 75C. Actual instability starts around 80-85C, which is right where you are. Permanent damage will occur in long-term exposure to 90-115C degree heat, and short term exposure to temperatures over that can cause permanent damage as well. Just because you aren't hitting the thermal cutoff point doesn't mean everything is fine and dandy.



The computer was fine before you overclocked. Overclocked, it's glitchy. Obvious explanation: the overclock screwed something up. Possible solution: don't overclock.


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

what he said ^

Plus it's an alienware. i.e sexy looking machine but crap at overclocking.


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

All right now I have a different problem. Now the computer won't start at all anymore. It loads the initial Alienware Screen, but doesn't get to Windows load bar, nor does it enter the BIOS setup when i hit F2. But what is happening is that the CAPS Lock is flashing while SCROLL and NUM are lit. Any suggestions? I have no idea what happened. I just restarted my computer after trying a lower clock speed than default. Down to almost 1.3 Ghz. It worked at that speed when i booted it but then when i wanted to restart it, it started doing this. I've had this problem once before, but it went away on it's own the next day. I had overclocked the RAM from 1333 to 1600 on one overclock... dumb idea, i know. From there the computer didn't turn on. I shut it down and then it worked the next day... which i found odd. 

Thanks for any answers.


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

you have underclocked and screwed the settings.

You will have to do a CMOS reset.

To do this you power down the computer if not done already, take out the battery and move the jumper pin from 1 to 2 after 20 minutes put the pin back then the battery and then power back up this will have reset the settings to the default settings.


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

I don't mean to sound like an idiot... but I have no idea how to do that. From what is sounds like that jumper pin is on the processor? Could you give me a brief explanation perhaps visual aid. Thank you.


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

Why is it not possible to underclock in the first place.


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

Daniel N said:


> I don't mean to sound like an idiot... but I have no idea how to do that. From what is sounds like that jumper pin is on the processor? Could you give me a brief explanation perhaps visual aid. Thank you.


I explained what to do, its the battery not the processor the pins are located beside the battery.


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

here it is again

Follow this guide carefully and be sure to push the power button as stated:

Clearing The CMOS 


Clearing RTC (Real Time Clock) RAM: 


Turn OFF the computer and unplug the power cord.


Hit the ON button (power button) on the case to remove any residual power.



Remove the onboard motherboard battery.


Move the Jumper Cap from pins 1 & 2 (default) to pins 2 & 3. Keep the cap on pins 2 & 3 for ten seconds, then move the cap back to pins 1 & 2.


Reinstall the Battery.


Plug in the power cord and turn on the computer.


Hold down the DEL key and enter the bios setup menu to re-enter data


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

Daniel N said:


> Why is it not possible to underclock in the first place.


if you go below what its set at on your motherboard to run at you will encounter problems although it can be done but doing it the way you have done is the wrong way to do it.


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

I still don't understand where these pins are supposed to be, or where to place them. I am supposed to take out the battery, and then move the pins to a different location? How am i supposed to get to the onboard motherboard battery?


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

Open up the case

the battery is a big shiny silver coin looking thing which is located usually on the right hand side of the motherboard. You take it out as described above and locate the pins which should be right next to it or below it on the motherboard. you do what is describe above.

If you have a motherboard manual it should have a diagram of your motherboard inside it and will show you were your battery and the pins are located.


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

here is a picture the silver thing is the battery the red arrow is pointing to the jumper pins. click on the picture to make it bigger. in this picture the cap on the pins would be taken of and moved down so pins 2+3 were covered leaving pin 1 exposed. As you can see from the picture pins 1+2 are covered and pin 3 is exposed.


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## Phædrus241 (Mar 28, 2009)

Since it's a laptop, the CMOS battery may be quite small and located in an awkward position. But there should still be a CMOS battery somewhere.


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

Phædrus2401 said:


> Since it's a laptop, the CMOS battery may be quite small and located in an awkward position. But there should still be a CMOS battery somewhere.


I forgot that.

it will still be there but you might need some tweezers to get at it.


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

All right that problem is solved now. Thank you guys, even tho taking the laptop apart was a *****. Now back to the graphics card problem. I have one more question: why do companies advertise these overclockable extreme processors if they can't handle anything? I mean you said that the engineers design them to run at a specific frequency, but if they advertise this stuff online, assuming that they tested it and it didn't work either, why do they sell it to everyone. Obviously this can't work for anyone else... except for maybe people gaming it up outside in Alaska... is there a proper way to do an overclock? I have the tools to read in temperatures and monitor my components, but I do not have the tools to overclock properly. 
Thank you again greenbrucelee for all your help, I thought i might have had a brand new computer to throw away.


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## Phædrus241 (Mar 28, 2009)

Overclocking can be done; I have my CPU overclocked by 43%. The thing is that overclocking produces heat, and lots of it. So you need a way to get rid of the heat, or the components are going to start malfunctioning. I have a CPU heatsink that is six inches tall and almost as wide, made of copper, that looks like an old-timey fan, and it has a high RPM 110mm fan in the middle of it. And my CPU still gets hot enough it could burn skin. If I were to overclock my graphics card more than 5% I'd want to get an aftermarket graphics card cooler, and some of those can be simply massive with as many as three fans.

Laptops don't have the cooling needed to do overclocking. You couldn't fit my CPU cooler into your laptop, or a decent VGA cooler. Yours probably has a better fan than most laptops do, but it still won't be enough for anything but a mild overclock. Laptops just are not good to overclock, because there's no cooling whatever, and there can be issues with the battery not physically being able to keep up with the power demands. 


If you had a desktop it would be a different story; invest some money in decent heatsinks and such and a good power supply and you'd be good to go. As is, overclocking just won't work out for you.


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

agree with the above.

This is why laptops are not good for overclocking, a laptop can overheat just by being placed on your knee whilst typing so stressing it out with overclocking really isn't a good idea.

As said above with a desktop you can add really good heatsinks, mine is also made of copper and is really big (it's a tuniq tower) I have my cpu overclocked from 3GHz to 3.91GHz and I could get more than that if I wanted to but if I tried with a laptop I might get 3.2 before encountering problems.


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## Phædrus241 (Mar 28, 2009)

This is the type of cooling you want if you're going to be overclocking your CPU more than 5-10%:


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

If you have your CPU overclocked by that much, does it have any effect when you are playing games... if you do... other than making it run smoother and better and faster. This brings me to another question. When I start playing games, that initial lag that I was talking about is there, and sometimes it comes randomly. But after about 5-10 minutes of playing the game, there is no more lag. It just goes away. Do you think that If i purchased a really good laptop cooler that i could possibly get better graphics performance without the lag, or is that initial lag already permanent due to my overclocking and I guess damaging my system. I still don't understand why my graphics cards are the ones that are damaged by the CPU overclock. When I played games and monitored the temperatures, the CPU temp rose by a little but the graphics cards temp seemed to be the same. Also might I be able to overclock with a laptop cooler. 
Thanks Phaedrus2401


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

your cpu, ram and pci slots (graphics card) are all linked by what is called the front side bus. This is what you change when you are overclocking to make the cpu faster. Anything that uses the FSB changes it's that simple.

your lag could be dependant on many thing, the cpu, ram and graphics card if they are all working in harmony together then you don't get lag but if they aren't you do.

you could try upgrading the graphics card and ram (this is what I would do if I had a laptop) I would never oc a laptop.

As for your question yes it does make a difference as it has made my system faster, I have yet to encounter a game that has caused it to slow down...yet. I say yet because it will happen even with the overclock.

Crysis is a good game for testing wether you have a good setup also games like fall out 3 and world in conflict are too. My system pi$$es all over them 

as for your cooling question in my opinion you would have to cool both your gpu and cpu to get anywhere but I think you might struggle because it's a laptop.

Laptops aren't very good for games even the ones designed for games.


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

Ok that makes more sense now, that all the components are linked. What i don't understand is why the graphics cards and cpu fans aren't constantly running at super high speeds? I mean is there a program to control the fans? Because when I play crysis, which by the way I can pi$$ over as well )) the fans are going at it pretty good. I mean why don't you just have the fans running the whole time at maximum level. I would do that, I really don't mind the noise at all. The lag goes away after a while, which I find is very interesting as well. Also you guys left this un-answered before. From my BIOS i can change the multiplier as well as the FSB speed over the memory and I think the CPU. Is there a huge difference between which you upgrade more? I mean as you said the FSB effects all, so should I lower that and make the mulltiplier really high? Does the multiplier effect only the CPU? Could you possibly explain that to me? What those all mean and how the work? Especially if it matter to put the multiplier higher or the FSB higher or vice versa to get the same GHz. Thanks again


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

Also my system cools really well, at the least the graphics cards do, that is why I am wondering about the fan control. I can cool from about 68, which is a better temp now playing crysis to like 39 within seconds after I stop playing crysis. Why not run the fans the entire time to ensure the component is cool?


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

this is where throttling comes into play.

There is a feature in the bios which will called Intel speedstep and c1e, can't think of the equivelant for amd at the moment where the speed of the cpu etc is slowed down to conserve power and heat your fans act accordingly to this.

When you overclock you disable these features but can renable them if you wish.

The throttling happens when the cpu and gpu are not doing very much such as browsing the internet but when you start playing a game the speeds go back up and so do the fans to accomodate the heat increase.

The fans will be running or they should be, use speedfan to see this happen. My cpu cooler for instance goes upto 2200RPM when I am playing a game but when I am on the net or doing basic stuff it goes down to 1750 although I have a control for it so I can lower it and speed it up when I want.


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

All right. 1 I don't have those features in my BIOS at least. I just looked and they were nowhere to be found. 2. I got speedfan, but I don't think that I can actually control my fan speeds with it because my the tab that has fans and where you are supposed to control them, no fans pop up for me.

I find this really interesting. I did a small overclock just to test the graphics again. It turns out that when I did this overclock 2.53 to 2.75, the graphics were absolutely flawless. I really don't understand why they don't work at 2.53. Should I keep them at this speed? GPU and CPU temp seems to be fine according to speedfan, GPU hasn't gone above 68 on crysis and the CPU remain at roughly 50. Can you control the fans somehow. 

As for the BIOS maybe I need to update my firmware?

Thanks


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

your bios will have the setting in the advanced section.

do not use speed fan to read temperatures it is totally innacurate use the BIOS, as for software temp monitors you should use real temp with the TJ max set to 95 for intel cpus and core temp for amd cpus.

well the overclock you have done could be the best you can get, every system has a limit and not all cpus are created equal so someone with the same setup as you might get better results or worse results than you.

no you don't need to update your bios, bios update are only done for new cpu support or major problems.


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

I looked in the advanced section. Unless it was under another name. The only things under my advanced section are overclocking, graphics settings, USB stuff, Hard Drive Settings, and that's it. Nothing called Intel Speedstep or C1e. I have real temp. Could you explain to me how to use the TJ max, I don't understand what it is supposed to do. I played with it a bit, but I have no idea what I am doing. 

I guess my overclocked worked, but why don't my graphics cards work at 2.53, the default? Does it just have to run at a higher speed because I damaged it. Or am I just damaging it more? Even tho I am keeping temperatures below 68?

Thanks greenbrucelee and phaedrus2401


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

you set the TJ max to 95 this is your thermal junction which basically means if it all the thermal junction figures go to 0 your screwed.

The TJ max makes the temperature figures more accurate.

It may just be that when you get to 2.53 that is your cut off like I said earlier every system has it's limit.


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

I still havn't found that speedstep and C1e stuff in the BIOS. You guys said it was supposed to be in the advanced section, but I really have nothing like that in there. I don't think you guys explained this before but could you explain the difference in the BIOS between the RAM and FSB bus speed. Because I can change both. I understand the FSB controls all components now, but what about the RAM. Is the ram mhz value also the speed of only the RAM? What about the multiplier, does it really matter which is higher the FSB or the multiplier. Besides the fact that i don't want to screw up my computer again underclocking, does the multiplier have an effect on anything but the CPU?


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## Tyree (May 10, 2009)

Laptops are designed for portability and convenience.
If you want performance you need a desktop PC.
The Bios is limited on laptops for the very reasons you are experiencing.


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

right

ddr ram stands for double data rate this means the ram speed is double the speed of the FSB so if your fsb is 433 then your ram should be 866.

Some people when they overclock they drop the multiplier and raise the FSB this is entirely upto the person doing it.

i you download cpu-z and look in the memory section you will find what speed your ram is and what ratio it runs at.

you may find that it will say 5:6 but 1:1 is better but this is usually achieved in overclocking.


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## Daniel N (May 31, 2009)

Another thing that really fascinates me is that when I play crysis I monitor my temp and it doesn't seem to go above like 68 and the fans are really going at it. Then when I switch to one GPU and turn off the second when I am dual-screening my monitors, and play a game like GRID (also pretty graphic intensive) the temperature gets to like 75 and the fans aren't going at it? ***? I don't understand. Why not keep the fans running. There has to be a program to continuously keep the fans at full blast. Especially if you guys say that 75 is where instability starts, I have been at 79 once playing crysis on one GPU, and now I am really afraid of damaging more hardware. Do the engineers not realize this or something when they test the system, are they that dumb? Unbelievable.


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

you seem to missing the whole thing here.

laptops get hot because they are small, anything inside them is small and gets hot too. The cpu fan throttles down to a slower speed when it isn't doing anything intensive.

your laptop gpu will get hot because it's in an encloses space. I would say 79 degrees c isn't too hot for a gpu but it is for a cpu.


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## Phædrus241 (Mar 28, 2009)

79C isn't hot enough to damage the graphics card itself, usually. 85C and higher is when I really start to get concerned. 75C is usually the point at which you start seeing instability.


Are you still getting the glitches now that you've undone the overclock?


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