Overclocking my new laptop

[Ðrзω™]

The trick in this mod is to fool the mainboard into thinking the chip is a 533 MHz bus speed (4 times 133).

This is accomplished by inserting a tiny jumper in the ZIF socket on the main board, of course after removing the CPU. The jumper goes in the third row of pins, between pins 15 and 16. This picture clearly shows the jumper in place, ready for the processor to be inserted:

The scariest part of this whole process is the disassembly of the notebook. With a laptop, this requires completely taking apart the unit to get to the ZIF socket. Luckily for us overclockers, Dell provides a complete breakdown guide from beginning to end, so dissasembly is a snap!

Of course, while I had the laptop apart I cleaned up the heatsinks, removed the thermal pads and applied Arctic Silver to keep everything as cool as possible, especially since the overclocked chip will run warmer. The end result of my 35 minutes of labor:

My sluggish 1.3 GHz Celeron has been cranked up to 1.72 GHz! This is an absolutely free 32% overclock! The temperature difference was also less than 10 degrees Celsius, which made the maximum CPU temperature around 45, which is not so bad. I encourage anyone with the 400 MHz bus CPUs (Celeron M or Pentium M chips) to try this mod on your laptops or systems.

Now my parents recently bought me a Advent 7081 laptop which has a SiS661GX Chipset (although CPU-Z reports it as the newer and better 661FX ). Regardles of the chipset version both of these support 533MHz FSB.

I would really like to do this mod as my CPU is the 1.3GHz Celeron M Dothan chip. Plus this would be a great boost to a £400 laptop. The only things im worried about are, disassembly of laptop (not my biggest concern) and how i would insert a jumper into the ZIF socket. Which kind of jumper should i use? Can i just take the plastic off a normal HDD/motherboard jumper and insert it in? Will any pins be broken due to this?

Any advice would be appreciated

[ripken204]

i doubt that anyone will be able to help you as overclocking laptops it HIGHLY not recommended b/c of cooling issues. 99.9% of ppl with laptops dont/cant overclock them, you are talking about modding it too. there is a reason that you are not able to overclock in the bios.

[Gouki]

I would visit notebookforums.com

If there anything you can do with your laptop, they can tell you!

[LLXX]

First of all, your laptop is going to feel warmer. Maybe even a lot warmer. Make sure you have an adequate thermal solution. Laptops don't have much ventilation in their cases.

For the bridging jumper, you'd need a very fine piece of wire, approximately the width of a hair. If it's too thick the pin won't go into the hole with it. It is possible to break the pins, so be careful.

(I've heard that Celerons tend to be very overclockable... myself having a desktop 2.4GHz unit that's now running at 3.6 with stock cooling for over a year now)

Edited December 28, 2005 by LLXX