HOW TO OVERCLOCK YOUR BIOS LOCKED LAPTOP/HOW TO INCREASE YOUR LAPTOP PC's PERFORMANCE

              HOW TO OVERCLOCK/INCREASE YOUR      

           BIOS-LOCKED LAPTOP PC's PERFORMANCE

*This overclock was performed on a 2003 Pentium 4 "Northwood" CPU, Toshiba Satellite 1950-801 laptop with a Nividia Geforce4 460 Go dedicated GPU, an Intel 845PE chipset motherboard and 2 GB's of PC-2700 DDR RAM.

• You are stuck with an old (and obsolete) laptop.
• Your laptop is BIOS locked, i.e. no overclocking options in your BIOS, so you can't overclock your CPU and memory.
• Your want to increase your laptop's gaming performance. 

Your options are as follows:

1. Flash your laptop with a modded BIOS which unlocks it. There is a risk that your laptop will get "bricked" if for some reason the flash is not done correctly or the modded reason doesn't work properly. A "bricked" laptop will no longer work and cannot be recovered unless by an authorized  manufacturer service tech.

2. Use software such as CLOCKGEN, CPUFSB etc. These software allow one to overclock one's laptop by manipulating a chip called PLL. Unfortunately for users of old laptops like mine, the makers of the above software do not include support for old PLL chips, hence overclocking is not possible.

Fortunately, there ARE a few simple things you CAN do:

1. Overclock your laptop's GPU.
2. Increase your laptop's memory performance by "tightening" your memory's timings.
3. Learn to identify and close CPU hogging applications prior to a gaming session.

Before we start, you need to do two things.

PART I: PREPARATION

1. You must buy a cooling pad. 

This is the cooling pad I am using:

As you can see, this specific cooling pad comes with a huge cooling fan, and this is just as well. The reasons you will need a cooling pad for your laptop are:

a. Overclocking your GPU above its rated specs will produce more heat, so your laptop will need additional cooling.

b. The lower your GPU's temperature is (or the best cooling you have got on your laptop) the more you can overclock your GPU Core and GPU memory, therefore the best cooling you have the greater your laptop's performance is going to be.

2. You need to clean your laptop thoroughly inside out.

If you are not comfortable with cleaning your laptop inside out, you can instead use your vacuum cleaner. Here's how:

-Set your Vacuum Cleaner to suck instead of blow air.
-Put the vacuum cleaner's tube on your laptop's exhaust vents and let it do its thing.

The point of cleaning your laptop thoroughly is to -again- lower its operating temperature therefore giving your laptop more performance through GPU overclocking.
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PART II: OVERCLOCKING

a. TIGHTENING YOUR MEMORY'S TIMINGS:

We will use the MEMSET software:

http://www.tweakers.fr/memset.html

Download and run MEMSET. Remember, on BIOS locked laptops you cannot improve the memory's performance directly, i.e. you cannot improve the memory's performance by increasing the memory's frequency b/c there are no such controls in your BIOS as it's factory "locked".

Here's how the MEMSET software looks like on my Pentium 4 laptop which comes with an Intel 845PE chipset motherboard (made in 2002):

(Memset timings and option will differ according to your motherboard so don't expect that you are going to get exactly the above timings).

The left MEMSET window is the tightened timings - increased performance window, while the MEMSET window on the right is how the memory runs at stock without any changes.

The only way to find which setting increases our memory's performance is to try each and every setting and then run a memory benchmark by using a benchmarking software. I recommend EVEREST.

Here's how our memory performed at stock:
 

And here's how our memory performed AFTER the memory timings were tightened:

We just increased our memory's performance as much we could. How do we see if it made a difference? We will use a dedicated software which measures PC performance. In this case, since my laptop was made in 2003, I used PC MARK BENCHMARK 2004.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=703

If your laptop is newer than mine, simply use a PC MARK version which was released at about the same time your laptop was made. For a detailed list of PC MARK versions see wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCMark

So, by running the dedicated GRAPHICS TEST of PC MARK 2004, I discovered that my laptop was performing with its GPU and memory at stock 1356 PC MARKS.  With its memory timings tightened, my laptop increased its graphics performance to 1387 PC MARKS. We just increased our GPU's performance by 2.28%.

Tightening your memory's settings should also offer a minor general performance boost to your laptop meaning that your laptop will feel a bit "snappier".

b. OVERCLOCKING YOUR GPU

We will use the RIVA TUNER software:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Video-Tweak/RivaTuner.shtml

After you download and install RIVA TUNER, you will need to find updated drivers for your laptop. If you have a NIVIDIA GPU in your laptop, I recommend that you use Mobile Force M4 stock drivers.

http://www.notebookforums.com/t/207695/nbf-mobileforce-xp-169-09-m4-32-bit-64-bit

What happens here is that OEM manufacturers (in this case TOSHIBA) stop releasing drivers for their products after about a year of them being released. This is a common practice (all OEM manufacturers do the same), and they do that in order to render their released laptops obsolete so that you throw your old laptop away and buy a new one. Fortunately, there are internet communities who release "modded" drivers for laptop OEM GPU's, which make these GPU's overclockable as well as offering more recent driver support.

NIVIDIA/ATI don't support old or OEM laptop GPUs too, so you are pretty much stuck unless you use the above private drivers.

If your laptop comes with an ATI GPU, search on the forum above (or elsewhere) for your equivalent modded ATI laptop GPU drivers.

After you replace your stock OEM drivers with the modded ones, we are ready to begin overclocking:

Open RIVA TUNER and point your mouse where I am pointing my mouse in the screenshot below:

Now, download and run GPUZ:

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2244/techpowerup-gpu-z-v0-7-1/

The above are my laptop GPU's stock settings.

-GPU Core Clock: 250 MHz
-GPU Memory Clock: 446 MHz
-GPU Pixel Fillrate:     500 MPixel/sec
-GPU Texture Fillrate: 1000 MTexel/sec
-GPU Bandwidth:  7136 MB/sec

What we will do now is incrementally increase our GPU's core and memory speed. As a rule-of-thumb, we will only manage to moderately overclock our GPU Core Clock (about +15% from its original value) while we will manage to overclock our GPU Memory Clock substantially more, in this case a whooping +30.71%!

Here's my final stable overclock:

-GPU Core Clock: 285 MHz +14%
-GPU Memory Clock: 583 MHz +30.71%
-GPU Pixel Fillrate:     568 MPixel/sec +13.6%
-GPU Texture Fillrate: 1136 MTexel/sec +13.6%
-GPU Bandwidth:  9280 MB/sec +30%

Congratulations, you just got increased performance out of your laptop for zero cost. It's as if you just changed your GPU with the next higher-in-line GPU model.

Let's look at Wikipedia:

 As we can see from the table above, the next higher model Geforce 4 488 Go has got a GPU Core clock of 300 Mhz, Memory Clock of 550 MHz, Bandwidth of 8.8 GB/sec, Pixel Fillrate of 600 and Texture Fillrate of 1200.

Now, let's get back to PC MARK 2004 and its GRAPHICS TEST. We will use it to gauge our graphics performance.

PC MARK 2004 GRAPHICS TEST at stock settings: 1356 PC MARKS
PC MARK 2004 GRAPHICS TEST at new overclocked settings: 1575 PC MARKS +16%

c. FINDING YOUR MAX STABLE OVERCLOCK

 The way to do that is simply check your GPU's stability with a game that really stresses your GPU or by running the PC MARK 2004's Graphics tests. (For later laptop models, just select a PC Mark version released close to the year your laptop was released).

If your GPU is not stable at a specific overclock, you will start noticing "artifacts" around the screen, meaning that the game will start looking "wrong", and you will start noticing several textures of the game appearing "wrong" or "corrupted".

If this happens, just lower your overclock until your gameplay is smooth and without any artifacts. This is how you will find your stable overclock.

Enjoy the higher performance of your laptop :-)
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       ADDENDUM: FURTHER IMPROVING YOUR LAPTOP'S     

                                     GAMING PERFORMANCE

Since we have got sufficient memory (2GB), what we need to do next is look for applications that run in the background and are "hogging" our CPU i.e. stealing our valuable CPU cycles. For this purpose, we will use a great software called PROCESS LASSO:

http://bitsum.com/howfree.php

As you can see, I have already set PROCESS LASSO to automatically shut down a number of CPU hogging software, namely vsnp2sdt.exe, tsnp2std.exe, fixcamera.exe, and applemobiledeviceservice.exe. 

The most glaring offender is MsMpEng.exe which is the Microsoft Antimalware Service. This service consumes an average of 22.71% of my CPU's cycles (!), then RAUI.exe, a Wi-Fi modem software service eats up 6.25% of my CPU's cycles, explorer.exe (open explorer windows) eat up 1.45% of my CPU's cycles, Irfan View a 1.53% of my CPU's cycles and next Apple's ipodservice.exe and ituneshelper.exe eat up 0.51% of my CPU's cycles.

The reason I am not using windows apps to close some of these services down, is that I use this laptop at work, and so when I am working I need all these services to run.

What we will do next is use PROCESS LASSO to shut down these CPU hogging apps (you can use task manager for the same purpose) and then use the windows app "services.msc" to shut down the annoying MsMpEng.exe (which is the Microsoft Antimalware Service):

The end result is that we just freed up  32.45% of our CPU cycles for exclusive gaming use :-) and we have consequently greatly increased our laptop's gaming performance:

A picture of Rome:Total War (2005) running on my laptop with all eye-candy turned on:

Enjoy :-)

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DISCLAIMER:

OVERCLOCKING MAY SUBJECT COMPONENTS TO ADDITIONAL STRESSES THAT MAY RESULT IN DAMAGE, DEGRADATION IN PERFORMANCE OR EVEN PREMATURE FAILURE. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MAY INFLICT ON YOUR PC AS A RESULT OF FOLLOWING THE ABOVE GUIDE.