Intel was founded on July 18, 1968 with one main goal in mind: to make semiconductor memory more practicle. Intels first microprocessor, the 4004 microcomputer, was released at the end of 1971. The chip was smaller then a thumbnail, contained 2300 transistors, and was capable of executing 60,000 operations in one second.
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AMD was first established on May 1, 1969 and started as a company working out of one of the co-founders living rooms. AMDS’s main goal was simple, they wanted to create a successful semiconductor company. By September AMD had raised enough money to open their first permanent home, at 901 Thompson Place in Sunnyrak.
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One of the most common complaints computer owners have is that their computer is too slow. Unless you own a shiny new G4, you have probably had this complaint in one form or another throughout daily use of your computer.
Most people know of all of the RAM upgrades and daughter cards, etc., that you can add inside your computer to speed it up a little (or a lot). But all these upgrades cost enough money to even make Bill Gates sick, so what is the person with a slow computer and not a lot of cash supposed to do?
Overclocking goes further back than the Celeron 300A. Back in the day 486s, 386s, and even 286s were all pushed beyond their specifications by people hoping to get some more speed out of them. Of course, back then, overclocking was still truly experimental. There was no SoftMenu III, and more likely than not, the jumper settings on your motherboard were completely undocumented. Some boards required a bit of soldering or makeshift jumpers to short out the proper settings, so burning out your CPU was a definite possibility.
The first big steps towards overclocking were made in the Pentium era. During this time, typical neighborhood techies discovered that a Pentium 75 was nothing more than an underclocked Pentium 90. Soon, people were taking Pentium 133s and turning them into 166s, and in turn 166s soon became 200s. When the 233MMX made an entrance, it soon became obvious that the chip had little trouble reaching 250MHz or 266MHz.
Overclocking is the practice of running computer equipment faster than it was designed to run at. It is analogous to tuning sports cars. Instead of horsepower and ft-lbs. of torque, its units are FLOPS and megahertz, but the drive for performance is the same. Overclocking has various reasons, several methods, and opposing views by the computer industry.
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The term overclocking refers to the running of a CPU at speeds that it was not designed to run at. Some chips that are sold in stores can actually handle more then what they say they can because the producer had to meet with the supply and demand so the actual speed of the processor may have been marked down to meet the demands of the consumers, most of the time this is probably not true. Now the key to successfuly overclock your CPU is to have a lot of cooling, in most cases the cooler the better and many fans are one the markets to help accomplish this. To overclock a CPU all you have to do is change the bus and CPU multiplier to a slightly higher level and on some motherboards change the CPU voltage setting. Now overclocking can drastically reduce the life of your processors but in many cases it will still probably last longer then it will be before you need an upgrade but their are still risks of frying your chip and motherboard well overclocking the CPU.