Overclocking Dell?

[Aynjell]

I know this is the worst question to possibly ask, but I have a Dell D600, and I'm seriously considering doing a pin mod on the pentium M in it, but prior to doing so I wanna test it without dinking around with the hardware. Any way to test this with like clockgen or anything? Is there a good way to do this?

My girlfriend has had this laptop for an eternity and in response to it being a worthless pile of junk and us wanting a laptop, I decided to try restoring this unit prior. A fresh coat of paint for this thing is a potential overclock, repairing the little broke parts (which might cost about 7.50).


We didn't have an optical drive in it, but asked our end user techs here and they had one sitting around and they brought it over to me and gave it to me. Haven't made it home to test it, but if it does work this project is coming together way too good for me not to test this. It's the dream setup for ubuntu too, Radeon 9000, pentium M, wireless worked when you install the driver perfectly...

it's just coming together too well for me not to run with this, so... if somebody can help me with this I'd greatly appreciate it. :)

[thideras]

TERRIBLE QUESTION. :p

Most of their boards can overclock, using software. The problem is, most of their boards don't use PCI/PCIe/AGP bus locks, which can cause some serious issues. I think the pinmod is going to be your safest bet as it will/should adjust the bus ratios correctly.

[Aynjell]

TERRIBLE QUESTION. :p

Most of their boards can overclock, using software. The problem is, most of their boards don't use PCI/PCIe/AGP bus locks, which can cause some serious issues. I think the pinmod is going to be your safest bet as it will/should adjust the bus ratios correctly.


Yeah, I was afraid of something like that. I just don't wanna do the work and then have to undo it. Oh well, either way it's gotta get tore down, because the video card overheats often... gonna clean it out and re-tim it and pray that fixes it. I'll install Xp back onto it so I can run the gamut of tests and re-calibrate the batteries.

I ordered up the secondary battery that fits into the CD rom slot. If I can get both of those batteries calibrated might be able to squeeze netbook life out of a mid-size laptop with a reasonable fast albeit archaic cpu. :)

[Evilsizer]

which chipset is the laptop running and what is the fsb of the cpu? or you could just post a ss with the cpu/motherboard tab open. :)

[Aynjell]

which chipset is the laptop running and what is the fsb of the cpu? or you could just post a ss with the cpu/motherboard tab open. :)

From linux? Not sure that would be as friendly to your eyes as you're used to...

But near as I can tell, we've got the following specs:
Pentium M, 1.6Ghz 1MB of cache (recently learned this, so from what I know this chip isn't compatible with the mod)
Not a chipset that supports 533, so that means it's sketchy at best if this will work.

I've sort of come to the conclusion I won't be trying it. Just gonna dust her out this weekend and leave it be and just be thankful we breathed some life into it. On a good note, the guy from hardware at my company gave me a DVD drive for the D600 (we used to deploy them), and it works fine. I guess they were gonna throw 'em away so it was good I asked. :)

[I.M.O.G.]

As thideras mentioned, the software overclocking tools are an option, but once you pull other busses out of spec you'll see issues. Anyone remember or can reference the specifics? I'm on my phone or I'd look up the details of exactly where you can expect to find limits... But I remember reading those limits also depend upon your specific hardware. Some things are more friendly to running beyond spec than others, but I recall reading the exact equations regarding how far out of spec a certain bus would be given a certain amount of FSB overclock.

[I.M.O.G.]

Other than a passing mention of ubuntu you didn't make it clear you were using linux.

Since you already ruled out the pinmod and since windows software overclocks aren't an option, there are much better choices than ubuntu. Ubuntu is the vista of linux distributions - it works well, its easy, but its not lean and mean.

If you are interested in other distros, we could talk about more appropriate options. Best place to start is by talking about what this laptop will be used for however.

Browsing, email, word processing... What else?

[Aynjell]

Other than a passing mention of ubuntu you didn't make it clear you were using linux.

Since you already ruled out the pinmod and since windows software overclocks aren't an option, there are much better choices than ubuntu. Ubuntu is the vista of linux distributions - it works well, its easy, but its not lean and mean.

If you are interested in other distros, we could talk about more appropriate options. Best place to start is by talking about what this laptop will be used for however.

Browsing, email, word processing... What else?

And some C\C++ programming. And to be honest, I am only familiar with two distributions, both polar opposites: gentoo and ubuntu. Ubuntu being my preferred OS for the laptop.

If you have another suggestion for me for the laptop's OS, I'd love to hear about it, but I'm pretty content with where it's at now.

Also, I'd never rely on a software OC for 24/7 overclock, and since the pin mod isn't an option the question is sort of irrelevant now. As of right now though, it's running quite well. I can't find anything about it that is actually slow when running ubuntu. I'm sure slimming down even more might boost performance, but honestly, by how much? To get vista like comfort for a fraction of the performance... I mean realistically the slowest app on this thing is going to be Firefox. Not much improvement to be had, regardless of distribution.

Also, I had a laptop a long time ago. It was a huge pain in the ass to setup under linux. Things are better now, but I will not repeat that incedent, and Ubuntu is helping me achieve that exact goal.