Look, I know you’re going to find this hard to believe. But apparently overclocking your CPU will improve your PC’s performance (while decreasing your expected battery life). Shocking, but true. I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Yesterday I visited jkOnTheRun’s Kevin Tofel, who recently installed a BIOS update on his MSI Wind netbook which allows you to boost the CPU speed by 8%, 15%, or 24%.

Kevin ran a few benchmarks, and surprisingly enough, the CPU performance went up by… about 8%, 15%, and 24%. Of course, memory, hard drive perfromance, and other benchmarks remained pretty much the same.

The BIOS update also enables some nice features like the ability to automatically underclock your netbook when you unplug the power cable to save battery power. And as Kevin showed me, the power LED now displays three distinct colors to let you know if your netbook is running overclocked, underclocked, or at normal speed.

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2 replies on “Shocking news: Overclocking a netbook improves performance”

  1. Actually the overclock cannot decrease battery life, because you have to be connected to a/c power to enable it.

  2. Shocking… More Mhz means more CPU performance… I think someone should write a paper about this!!!

    Seriously, it is interesting that the MSI guys are providing a BIOS with overclocking capabilites, I always thought OEM didn’t like to let you tweak your hardware and it was all very black hat stuff! Well done MSI!

    Gary

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