Overclocking advice

[GrosPoisson]

A guy on another forum I frequent is interested in overclocking his laptop's Pentium M processor from 730 spec to 800 spec (1.6GHz to 2.0 GHz) to play some game or another. He's new to overclocking, so do you think you could give me some general advice that I could relay to him? Thanks.

Requirements:
Pentium Processor 800

Specs:
Dell Inspiron 6000D
Pentium MProcessor 730 (1.60GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)
1GB, DDR2, 400MHz 2 Dimms
128MB ATI Mobility Radeon X300Video Card
60GB Ultra ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive

[siddy]

laptop? I really don't know much about overclocking laptops, but i'd steer away from it.

there might be some tutorials on the intarweb, check there first.

edit: 1.6 ghz for a pentium M is not the same as 1.6 ghz on their desktop brothers. It's like AMD, they have fewer 'steps' per cycle, so they can run faster with fewer cycles.

[StandingCow]

Watch his temp closly... and he really doesnt need to overclock.. my pentium M 740 (1.73 MHZ) runs all new games just fine.

The only difference between his laptop and mine is:
Mine is Inspiron 9300 (that really makes no diff)
Pentium M 740
Geforce Go 6800

So if ANYTHING is holding him back its the graphics card... on mine I can play any new games just fine.

Point is I dont belive its the processor.

[phide]

BIOS likely won't allow changing the FSB or multiplier, so you essentially can't overclock.

Hope that helps.

[GrosPoisson]

Thanks for all the replies, I'll go break the news to him :D

[StandingCow]

There are other programs that allow you to overclock... but I would advice against it on a laptop.

[spartan]

I seriously do not recommend overclocking a laptop as the cooling is simply not adequate to keep up with even a simple 200-400mhz increment. I've heard more then one story of someone frying his Dell and getting turned away from tech support/replacement after they discovered the guy was trying to get a few more frames per second out of DOOM3.

With a setup like you've described anyway, the bottleneck is in the x300 graphics card. Not so much the CPU.

Plus, as already mentioned, the Dell mobos don't let you overclock in the BIOS. There are other methods, but I'm not an expert at them. Direct him to google if he's persistant.

[Glock23]

do you think you could give me some general advice that I could relay to him? Thanks.
Don't.