This is just to cover what overclocking is and what it does generally.
The term overclocking describes the process of running your CPU at a clock and/or bus speed that the CPU has not been specified for - logically that speed is usually higher.
- taken from Tom's Hardware
Which means that by changing the CPU's speed to almost it's clock speed limit, you can achieve faster performance, you will also be needing more cooling since your CPU will be working twice the recommended speed.
Graphics cards can also be overclocked, with utilities such as EVGA's Precision, RivaTuner, ATIOverdrive (on ATI cards only), MSI Afterburner, or the PEG Link Mode on ASUS motherboards. Overclocking a GPU will often yield a marked increase in performance in synthetic benchmarks, and usually will improve game performance too. Sometimes, it is possible to see that a graphics card is pushed beyond its limits before any permanent damage is done by observing on-screen distortions known as artifacts. Two such discriminated "warning bells" are widely understood: green-flashing, random triangles appearing on the screen usually correspond to overheating problems on the GPU itself, while white, flashing dots appearing randomly (usually in groups) on the screen often mean that the card's RAM is overheating. It is common to run into one of those problems when overclocking graphics cards. Showing both symptoms at the same time usually means that the card is severely pushed beyond its heat/clock rate/voltage limits. If seen at normal clock rate, voltage and temperature, they may indicate faults with the card itself. However, if the video card is simply clocked too high and doesen't overheat then the artifacts are a bit different. There are many different ways for this to show up and any irregularities should be considered but usually if the core is pushed too hard black circles or blobs appear on the screen and overclocking the video memory beyond its limits usually results in the application or the entire operating system crashing. Luckily though, after the computer is restarted the settings is reset to stock (Stored in the video card BIOS) and the maximum clock rate of that specific card has been found.Some overclockers use a hardware voltage modification where a potentiometer is applied to the video card to manually adjust the voltage. This results in much greater flexibility, as overclocking software for graphics cards is rarely able to freely adjust the voltage. Voltage mods are very risky and may result in a dead video card, especially if the voltage modification ("voltmod") is applied by an inexperienced individual. A pencil volt mod refers to changing a resistor's value on the graphics card by drawing across it with a graphite pencil. This results in a change of GPU voltage. It is also worth mentioning that adding physical elements to the video card immediately voids the warranty.
This is all the time I have for now, I'll be covering other topics regarding overclocking in the next post.
