Will someone please tell me how to overclock?

[dmccloud]

OP: Your best bet is to follow the advice in this thread and look at the Activity Monitor to see what's consuming the most CPU cycles. Overclocking your machine is not only next to impossible, but likely to fry your system permanently. If what you want is more speed and performance, then you'd be better served to skip trying to overclock the Macbook and just buying a replacement. Think of it as skipping a step to get to the same result...

 

[clickclickw00t]

Overclocking a 5 year old laptop with barely any airflow already? You might as well save the laptop and buy a new one because you are SURE to kill it...

Why not just sell it and upgrade.Penryn is old tech

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Unbelievable. He asks how to delete a plist and hasn’t even told us what AM gave him. Hopefully, he doesn’t delete something he shouldn’t.

Ah, come on. Everyone should delete something important once in a while, just to know, what can be done that way.
I am not to afraid to say, that I once renamed the "Windows" folder in Windows 3.11 into "Windows 95", and as a result, Windows didn't boot.
To be fair, I have just turned 44 or something in that vicinity and didn't really know better.
Now I know and just delete the occasional .dll files on Windows computers I visit. At least it gives me something to do, and will then be asked to fix it. I bought my first teleporter that way.
Anyway, I guess it is the .plist everyone fears to even look at or name, just like that Lord.

Oh man, I better watch my Zorg commercial till its end.

 

[saberahul]

You could take it off the wall and stand on it

 

[DWBurke811]

Alright look, no one really recommends doing this, and neither do I. You will literally cook the living piss out of your MacBook, Unless you have liquid nitrogen running through your computer.MacBooks run hot enough already, I wouldn't want to see what it's like after being overclocked.

However, if you feel it absolutely necessary, there is a shareware app you can use to manually adjust your clock speed. I honestly don't know anything about it, or how to use it. But, it has a good rating on MacUpdate. Here is the link: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23183/coolbookcontroller

Good luck with the second and third degree burns that will soon follow...

That's not what coolbook does; it allows you to lower the voltage at given clock speeds, not change your clock speed(well, you can sorta lower it but that's something different). Unless there's some hack on top that you can enter different clocks(there isn't one that I know of, but there's a lot that I don't know so there very well could be), I don't think coolbook would help him.

That said, it's well worth the $10. It's the only software/OS I've purchased(and I bought a lisence for my girlfriends MBP), and will be getting it for all my future Macs

 

[lindstedt56]

Coolbook looks like it could be very useful but I dont like the licensing terms that come with the program. You are only allowed to install it once on one computer. So if you bought a new computer and even uninstalled it on your old one you would have to buy it again.

 

[DWBurke811]

It's ten bucks, is it really a big deal buying it again?

 

[sth]

Overclocking a 5 year old laptop with barely any airflow already? You might as well save the laptop and buy a new one because you are SURE to kill it...

Why not just sell it and upgrade.Penryn is old tech

His notebook is probably a 2008 model, so it's not really that old.

Anyway, we still don't know what the actual problem is. Heck, we don't even know exactly what he's trying to do. He mentioned games (in which case, the GPU, rather than then CPU, will be the limiting factor), then he showed a screenshot with 50% idle usage while importing a video (which just means that he's I/O limited and therefore overclocking, again, would do nothing except potentially killing his machine). He mentioned video editing, which could range from "easily doable on this machine" to "better buy a mac pro for this" without knowing any details, ...

 

[Mobius 1]

A high idle % means that nothing is requesting more resources. So over-clocking wouldn't help in this case as the full power of the machine isn't being used as it is. You'd just end up with slightly faster idle CPU cycles (and the aforementioned meltdown, quite probably).

A possibly more relevant question is 'how are you importing the video'? If the source is a USB hard drive, flash drive/card, firewire drive or other connected device, then the slowness is very likely in the transfer, not in the horsepower of your laptop. Especially if the file is large and being transcoded as it's ingested.

If it is an external source, then you're limited by the speed that device can transfer the file. And then there are other possible slowdowns (is it less than a class 6 card? is it a 5400 rpm drive? is it a USB 1.x device? etc.)

Another possibility, if it's not an external device that's slowing you down, is a problem with your internal hard drive. But you can find that out quickly by running Disk Utility, clicking on your Macintosh volume and clicking 'verify disk'.

One other possible culprit is that the program ingesting the video is not multi-threaded and can, therefore, only use one core of your multi-core CPU.

Good luck. But, again, over-clocking is not what you need.

nah i already copied the file from a camera to my desktop and dragging it to the app


i deleted the plist at firefox (which itself creates new one) and it dropped to about 20 rather than the original 30-35.

i'll try this with other app and see what happens

Overclocking a 5 year old laptop with barely any airflow already? You might as well save the laptop and buy a new one because you are SURE to kill it...

Why not just sell it and upgrade.Penryn is old tech

i know, i know. but i don't have the money, even for a refurb model\












btw i read that by using yes>/dev/null you'll be able to completely prevent the CPU power from being idle?

 

[snaky69]

nah i already copied the file from a camera to my desktop and dragging it to the app


i deleted the plist at firefox (which itself creates new one) and it dropped to about 20 rather than the original 30-35.

i'll try this with other app and see what happens





i know, i know. but i don't have the money, even for a refurb model\












btw i read that by using yes>/dev/null you'll be able to completely prevent the CPU power from being idle?

Idle CPU power is good, it means it is ready to be used by the rest of the computer for other tasks.

Running the yes command will eat up 100% of one core, meaning it will not be usable for anything else than displaying yes in the terminal windows, if you run a second instance, both cores will be maxed out. Apart from heating up your Mac and making it sound like a jet engine, you will not help anything running "yes", you'll only make your computer slower, which is the exact opposite of what you are wanting to do.

You don't seem to understand how computers work at all.


Now, Mobius 1. Be clear and precise:

-What is "too slow" for you on the machine that you feel the need to overclock it?

-What programs(and please, actuallly name them) do you use on a regular basis? Are they pirated? I ask because sometimes Pirated software is an old BETA version that is still buggy and slow.

-What do you generally do with the computer?

-You mentioned games, care to name them?

-Do you run virtual machines?

-What type of hard drive is in there? How much space have you got left?


List the answer to those questions, and any more info you think might be useful in your next answer. This will help us help you, and make you forum experience much more useful.

We're just trying to help you out, but you not giving us all the info and refusing to listen to what we tell you is hindering us.

 

[DWBurke811]

\

btw i read that by using yes>/dev/null you'll be able to completely prevent the CPU power from being idle?

coolbook allows you to set your min clock speed, but, aside for the fraction of a second that your processors switching clocks, I don't see this helping anything.

 

[Mobius 1]

Idle CPU power is good, it means it is ready to be used by the rest of the computer for other tasks.

Running the yes command will eat up 100% of one core, meaning it will not be usable for anything else than displaying yes in the terminal windows, if you run a second instance, both cores will be maxed out. Apart from heating up your Mac and making it sound like a jet engine, you will not help anything running "yes", you'll only make your computer slower, which is the exact opposite of what you are wanting to do.

You don't seem to understand how computers work at all.


Now, Mobius 1. Be clear and precise:

-What is "too slow" for you on the machine that you feel the need to overclock it?

-What programs(and please, actuallly name them) do you use on a regular basis? Are they pirated? I ask because sometimes Pirated software is an old BETA version that is still buggy and slow.

-What do you generally do with the computer?

-You mentioned games, care to name them?

-Do you run virtual machines?

-What type of hard drive is in there? How much space have you got left?


List the answer to those questions, and any more info you think might be useful in your next answer. This will help us help you, and make you forum experience much more useful.

We're just trying to help you out, but you not giving us all the info and refusing to listen to what we tell you is hindering us.

-i feel the processor is overloaded and won't run any faster
-not pirated, no beta
-edit movies (render etc), photoshop, browse, game
-i see the website on apple showing COD4, i tried that and it lags, and minecraft (being 16-bit and all it's very CPU intensive)
-no
-Momentus XT 500GB, 400GB left