Overclocking

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Increasing macbook pro speed?

Well first off my friend has a laptop with the same 9600m card that the macbook pro has and he has been overclocking his to stock 9700m speeds with no ill efects as of yet. My question is since I am getting new unibody macbook pro in about a week, has anyone had any luck overcloking the new macbooks? Any comments or recomendations? Im not quite comfortable overclocking it as high as my friend did but it think a reasonable overclocking can be very advantageous.
 
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overclocking can be very advantageous.

And highly dangerous to your laptop. Think of how hot a MacBook gets regardless of overclocking it or not - pretty darn hot. Add in the fact you're making the processor now work even harder which would mean either A. You're going to fry the logic board or B. You decided to somehow add an additional fan to cool the logic board off.

The only time I would EVER overclock a computer is if it was a desktop.
 

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I really second what Jaguar said. Unless you plan on adding cooling which is crazy I wouldn't be a good idea at all. Why do you need the power anyway? The mbp has a great set of cards in them. I don't think you need it anyway.
 
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I really second what Jaguar said. Unless you plan on adding cooling which is crazy I wouldn't be a good idea at all. Why do you need the power anyway? The mbp has a great set of cards in them. I don't think you need it anyway.

Unfortunately, I am going to have to say that both of you are wrong. The MacBook Pro is greatly under clocked to the degree that the processor is working hard as a result of it. I have succesfully overclocke my MacBook Pro and I have noticed that the processors (and entire system in general) is running cooler. The fans do not ramp up as much as they used to. Just to make things clear by the way, the game I have used to test my findings is Crysis and Crysis: Warhead. Resolution 1024x768, and everything set to medium/mainstream including motion blur except for the first Crysis.
 

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Interesting. How did you go about doing that?
 
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I just don't understand why people feel the need to potentially damage their computer, only to squeeze an insignificant additional amount of performance out of it.

Then, if something does go wrong, these are the same people who will take their fried MacBook back to Apple (or laptop back to Dell...whatever) saying "I don't know what happened. It got really hot and then shut down and now it won't boot".
 
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I just don't understand why people feel the need to potentially damage their computer, only to squeeze an insignificant additional amount of performance out of it.

Then, if something does go wrong, these are the same people who will take their fried MacBook back to Apple (or laptop back to Dell...whatever) saying "I don't know what happened. It got really hot and then shut down and now it won't boot".

It is often not an insignificant amount. I spent many years o/c'g my desktop rigs. I have a P4 3.2 Ghz, overclocked to just under 4 Ghz that is now 5 years old and still runs like a champ. The ATI card also is o/c'd more than 25%. Of course there were precautions, proper motherboard, upgraded heat sinks, fans, high end memory that could take the upped voltage, etc. My o/c on that machine reduced my video encode times by greater than 25%. This was a very significant amount of time to me when I was doing multiple encodes a day.

But, I don't believe I'll be overclocking my notebook. At least not until this one becomes my back up computer.

I am with cwa though, would like to know how you overclocked DriftNut. Am sure I'll want to give it a try at some point.
 
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My comment was pertaining to overclocking a laptop.
 
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It is often not an insignificant amount. I spent many years o/c'g my desktop rigs. I have a P4 3.2 Ghz, overclocked to just under 4 Ghz that is now 5 years old and still runs like a champ. The ATI card also is o/c'd more than 25%. Of course there were precautions, proper motherboard, upgraded heat sinks, fans, high end memory that could take the upped voltage, etc. My o/c on that machine reduced my video encode times by greater than 25%. This was a very significant amount of time to me when I was doing multiple encodes a day.

But, I don't believe I'll be overclocking my notebook. At least not until this one becomes my back up computer.

I am with cwa though, would like to know how you overclocked DriftNut. Am sure I'll want to give it a try at some point.

Just to clarify, the overclock that I did was on the graphics card. A 2.4 ghz processor is more than enough for me plus apple has the motherboard locked down good an tight. I did the overclock in windows xp using a program called riva tuner to do a driver level over clock. I chose driver level because it doesn't affect the state of my warranty. It's been a while since I done it but I believe the clock speeds were 575/1050/701 - core clock/shader clock/VRAM respectfully.
 

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Just to clarify, the overclock that I did was on the graphics card. A 2.4 ghz processor is more than enough for me plus apple has the motherboard locked down good an tight. I did the overclock in windows xp using a program called riva tuner to do a driver level over clock. I chose driver level because it doesn't affect the state of my warranty. It's been a while since I done it but I believe the clock speeds were 575/1050/701 - core clock/shader clock/VRAM respectfully.

OK, is that an ATI chip? I know I'd be really hesitant to do it on one of the 8600GT-powered MacBook Pros, especially in light of the defects known to exist with those chips. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is purposely underclocking them just to reduce the failure rate.
 
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OK, is that an ATI chip? I know I'd be really hesitant to do it on one of the 8600GT-powered MacBook Pros, especially in light of the defects known to exist with those chips. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is purposely underclocking them just to reduce the failure rate.

This will shock you then because it was the 8600 GT. I got the latest MacBook pro before they rolled out the Unibody Mac. And, I never really heard about the defects, which is surprising considering at the time that I bought it I was working at Best Buy.
 

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I know the ATI in my MBP is under clocked after doing some checking right after getting it. Wouldn't be surprised if most graphics cards were.

Apple wouldn't be the first, nor only manufacturer to do it. When I was doing support for Dell (many moons ago now), pretty much all ATI cards were under clocked. They were also proprietary to Dell (e.g. they were not the same card as the one you would buy retail, that's one of the ways they kept the cost down). You couldn't even use the drivers from ATI with them, you had to use Dell's (at least for support and if you wanted the card functioning properly).
 

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I know the ATI in my MBP is under clocked after doing some checking right after getting it. Wouldn't be surprised if most graphics cards were.

Apple wouldn't be the first, nor only manufacturer to do it. When I was doing support for Dell (many moons ago now), pretty much all ATI cards were under clocked. They were also proprietary to Dell (e.g. they were not the same card as the one you would buy retail, that's one of the ways they kept the cost down). You couldn't even use the drivers from ATI with them, you had to use Dell's (at least for support and if you wanted the card functioning properly).

Every manufacturer of laptops to date, besides the higher-end companies like Alienware, under-clock their graphics cards. The difference is that Apple has reduced the default clock speed on the MacBook Pro to 350 MHz where as similar other laptops have only been reduced to 470 MHz. The fact that I chose increase my clock speed just a little more than that (575) is my own choice, but to increase it to 470 MHz is perfectly safe; and like I said before it actually helped my computer in the long run.
 
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I read into the link that you posted and it stated that only a select few were affected by the problem and that anyone affected would be helped so long the repair was within two years of the purchase so i'm not that worried. I also have the BestBuy service plan which means the more repairs done to my computer the higher the chance of my getting the new MacBook as a replacement.
 

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