Overclocking under Ubuntu

Question

I want to overclock my Desktop computer: Intel Core 2 Duo E6550. I googled it and I found many sites, but none for Linux (I have Ubuntu 8.10)

Can anyone help me to find out how to do that?

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Overclocking under the BIOS seems to be impossible in my DELL comp, besides, DELL limit options in its BIOSes because they does give best performance already.

But, I would like to not Upgrade my CPU speed, but Downgrade it... if someone asks why, I just can say that I'm performing some Predictability/performance Benches, and I would like to run my 333MHz 4 bumped FSB at 100MHz 4 Bubmped FSB in order to check if when CPU speed is lower, performance goes lower either, but predictability increases as well...

a solution does exist: I just have to set the two MSR bits of the MSR_FSB_FREQ register to 100b (for binary) as suggests it the Intel Architecture manual Vol 3.B. The problem is that it seems to fail when I try to write on this register, and the most bizarre thing is that it is the only register that won't write...

This is why I'm asking about overclocking under Linux (I work with Linux), cause it seems to be not possible when I try doing it programatically... so maybe one of you knows some software or some trick to make it?

Solution

Overclocking CPUs is usually done via the motherboard bios software. You can get utilities in Windows that will overclock your CPU. But it is recomended that you do it through the BIOS instead.

In order to overclock your motherboard must support things like increasing the FSB speed as well as the CPU multiplier. Most standard motherboards do not support this. You need a slightly higher end motherboard to accommodate it.

Comments

[nkr1pt]

should be a superuser question.

[Admin]

moho, this is a question for ServerFault not StackOverflow.

[voyager]

Why you want to overclock your desktop?

[kmarsh]

Why would you not want to overclock your desktop? (Assuming you have good hardware and some tolerance for risk!) Intel's Core 2 architecture leaves plenty of overhead on lower-end CPU's, which are made of the same stuff as the higher end models.

[kmarsh]

As a general rule, general rules should be ignored. Intel's lower-end E series are very good overclockers. I ran a similar one with a 50% overclock as my primary desktop for a year and a half, before buying a quad core once the prices came down.

[John T]

Yeah, overclocking on Linux is sort of an oxymoron. Linux is best known for stability, overclocking sort of diminishes that.