The dinosaurs among us used to go to the auto parts store and buy a rear window defogger repair kit to connect the dots on AMD's overclockable CPUs to increase speeds. With Intel's Core CPUs, we're back again to connect pads on the back of Intel's CPUs to increase FSBs. I picked up this conductive paint by Permatix ($13 - gag!):

Some have used small pieces of aluminum foil - I would not use anything that could work its way loose. The paint stays on - if you make a mistake, rub it off with acetone and start over (you have enough in the small bottle for two lifetimes).

There are plenty of articles around that show which pads to connect, so there's nothing new here. Removing the heatsink is easy - there are four screws holding the heatsink to the motherboard - pull the power plug, hit the Power On button to discharge any lingering voltage in the PS, disconnect the fan, unscrew in a crosswise pattern and twist to remove the heatsink from the CPU (the grease suctions the heatsink to the CPU). Pop open the socket and the CPU easily comes out. Clean off the thermal grease on both the CPU and heatsink (I used acetone).

It is essential that you do not paint the wrong pads and critical that you do not get any paint on other pads. What I did was to mask off the two pads:

You can just as easily use scotch tape - just take your time and do one line at a time, then join them along the edge. This paint dries very quickly so don't dawdle. I used a pin as the paint brush - anything bigger is like painting trim with a 5" brush.

A closer view of the mask...

...and the final result (two coats):

Secure the CPU to the socket, use thermal grease (I use IC Diamond 7 Carat), replace the heatsink with a squishing motion and tighten in a crosswise pattern. The screws have stops so you can't overtighten them. Replace the power cord and boot up - assuming you've done eveything OK, you should now be running at 2.4 GHz (the FSB MOD changes the FSB from 200 to 266 MHz - this is all you can do with this mobo/CPU combo).

Running MemSet now shows that the fsb/dram ratio is at 4:5:

This is changed from the previous 3:5 at 200 MHz FSB. This shows that everything is running at spec speeds - nothing in the system is running out of spec except the CPU; however, while the BIOS shows the CPU as a 1.8 GHz part, the motherboard treats it as a 2.4 GHz CPU running 266 MHz FSB.

Running Passmark Performance Test v6.1 at the "new stock settings" resulted in a benchmark of 674.8 compared to 553.5 before the FSB MOD - a 22% increase. Note that the CPU scores will scale with the FSB MOD ratio (266/200 = 33%; Passmark CPU 1316.7/995.5 = 32.3%) - the Passmark benchmark is a combined score for all components tested and as such will not track 1:1.

SiSandra shows how far this moves the Dell box compared to others:

Memory tweaks can move this a few points more - how aggressive is up to each user's risk profile.