The HP Mini 311 comes with NVIDIA ION graphics and either an Atom N270 or N280 processor. That gives it more oomph in the graphics department than the vast majority of Atom-based netbooks and notebooks on the market. But as I pointed out in my review of the laptop, it generally feels a little sluggish when you’re performing tasks that don’t take advantage of the graphics processor, such as surfing the web.
Now members of the MyHPMini forums have begun using a hacked BIOS that makes it easier to overclock the laptop, allocate additional memory for graphics, and make other modifications.
Bear in mind, there’s a difference between making overclocking easier and making it easy. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you should probably avoid this hack, as you can easily void your warranty and leave your notebook in an unbootable state (although early testers report that there are ways to revive a partially bricked system).
Some users are reporting that they’ve gotten their HP Mini 311 laptops to run as fast as 2.2GHz. Not bad for a processor that normally tops out at around 1.7GHz.
via Netbook Reports
Here’s a 3DMark06 run to show how much an impact this hack does to the machine.
https://img222.imageshack.us/i/3dmark.png/
And Scott, there is an option to expand VRAM to 512MB. Helps a lot with Windows Aero, too.
Just in case the last link doesn’t work:
https://img222.imageshack.us/img222/8963/3dmark.png
Nicely Done!
Over the years I have done some oc’ing and while it is fun it does have an impact on your machine. Heat being no.1. The thing I don’t like about netbooks is adding more dose not add more to video memory, which seems like kinda a waste. Some older laptops had this option and did have a noticeable effect. I don’t think I would oc it myself but I think he said there was an option for the video ram.
Many people think my next statement is stupid, but if you want a faster netbook get a faster os. Ubuntu is so much faster than windows it amazing. You can run geekbench in both os to check for yourself.