Overclocking
Overclocking the Penitum M processor has become one of the newest trends in the enthusiast community. Why? Because its easy, and because it makes the the Pentium M look like the beast it truly is.
Here is the CPU-Z screen of the default processor setup. It is running at 2.0 GHz on a 100 MHz FSB, quad-pumped to 400 MHz. We can also see that the CPU supports instruction sets up to SSE2, but no SSE3 or EM64T yet. I have included the other CPU-Z screens below for reference.
32 KB of L1 cache each for data and instructions and 2 MB of L2 cache.
The 167 MHz frequency on the memory bus means a DDR333 memory speed.
My overclocking of the Pentium M 755 on the DFI 855GME motherboard was pretty straight foward, simply bumping up the FSB was all that I needed to reach the fastest this processor was going to get. I was able to hit 120 MHz perfectly stable.
This brings the frequency to 2.4 GHz, a 20% overclock. The memory speed also increased to 200 MHz (DDR400) and I thought that quite convient to run benchmarks on.
The overclocking here is even more impressive noting that we are using the same voltage at 2.4 GHz as we did on 2.0 GHz and that we are still using the tiny, and very quiet DFI included heatsink.
Now let’s venture into the world of the performance tests.