When people say they "over clocked" the Chip, How are they doing this?

Generally, Macs cannot be overlocked (I would say no, but I'm certain someone would correct me). With PCs, the CPU is usually overclocked through the BIOS.

The rule usually goes, "if you have to ask, you probably shouldn't bother," as doing something wrong could cause instability and/or permanent damage due to heat problems.

Overclocking is, indeed, the process of making chips run faster at the cost of greater power consumption and heat.

In a Mac... I'd say it's dangerous as heck in comparison to a PC to overclock the CPU. In a PC you can always add another fan/water cooling system/liquid nitrogen cooling system, but a Mac is limited in space and heat dissipation.

The 8800 GT in a Mac Pro is very overclockable, and with the right utility in a small, temporary Windows partition, you can rewrite the Apple firmware to overclock the GPU by up to 100 Mhz without any detrimental results.

EricNau said:

The rule usually goes, "if you have to ask, you probably shouldn't bother," as doing something wrong could cause instability and/or permanent damage due to heat problems.

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Agree.

Tallest Skil said:

In a Mac... I'd say it's dangerous as heck in comparison to a PC to overclock the CPU. In a PC you can always add another fan/water cooling system/liquid nitrogen cooling system, but a Mac is limited in space and heat dissipation.

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I would say this is true for all Macs except the Mac Pro.

I OC PCs on occasion. Heat is the major issue. If you don't maintain the heat level, then you end up with an unstable system. IMHO, that in itself makes OC'ing a waste unless you have the patience to fine tune your system. Nothing like having an OC'ed system lock up on you during some critical work flow with your boss waiting on the results.