Unlocking the Multiplier - Part I

Ever since overclocking has gone mainstream slightly over three years ago, many users have been browsing the net to find new ways to boost their systems' performance. These people would have come across several FAQ's and tutorials on overclocking.

Today, a motherboard's performance is first judged on its overclock abilities and stability, and only second on its feature set. Video cards are judged the same way, as people want to be able to tweak every tenth of a frame out of their favorite first person shooter. Basically, overclocking has gone mainstream and the industry is trying to catch up with the demands of the overclock community, upping the specs for their products and bringing products to the market that raise the bar in both performance and quality.

Unfortunately there were computer dealers who saw fit to sell overclocked systems to the less-educated computer user, pushing an overclocked Pentium 166 MMX as a genuine Pentium 200 MMX, collecting a substantially larger profit as a result. Although such a system will perform similarly to an original Pentium 200 MMX system, customers still felt conned.

In a way, these computer dealers are not that much different than the CPU manufacturer, as all CPUs are manufactured using the same process, and are rated for a certain speed at the end of the production line as the manufacturer or the market demand see fit. Thus a Pentium 166 MMX could be a wolf in sheep's clothing, as it may very well be able to run at 200 MHz without problems. The only difference between the computer dealer and the CPU manufacturer is that the latter guarantees that the CPU will run problem-free at the rated speed, whereas an overclocked CPU might run into instability and freezing due to overheating.

These problems, instability and freezing, were the buzz words used by the retailers and resellers trying to stop this overclocking frenzy, as they saw their profit margins plummet as most educated PC-users took the gamble and bought a Pentium 166 MMX hoping to overclock it to 200 MHz and save a couple of hundred dollars.

Fortunately most motherboard manufacturers did see the potential and offered features in BIOS or through jumper settings that would increase the stability of their products when running overclocked. The CPU manufacturers however saw the drawback of this ever expanding practice. With the excellent results the overclocking community were getting due to the CPU manufacturers' excellent yields on their CPUs, they were missing out on lots of dollars as most educated users upped the performance by overclocking their system rather than buying the latest generation CPU.

The CPU manufacturers claimed that they were getting lower profit margins due to illegal "re-marks", and to computer dealers selling overclocked systems. In reality the CPU manufacturers were afraid of the overclocking frenzy catching on in the industry and professional world, where they still sold many more CPUs and chipsets to the big PC manufacturers than through the retail outlets. So if the big PC manufacturers like Compaq, Dell, Gateway and similar major players start to accept overclocking, the CPU manufacturers would really start to lose money as most businesses and companies would then refrain from doing an upgrade every two or three years, but rather change a few jumpers on the motherboard and make their investment pay a little longer.

Under the guise of stopping illegal remarking, the CPU manufacturers introduced the dreaded multiplier lock. This would lock a CPU's multiplier, the factor by which the bus speed is multiplied to derive the CPU speed, to one given value and rule out any overclocking on motherboards strictly built to the CPU manufacturers specifications. However, most of the commercially available motherboards already had alternate bus speeds and voltage tweaks, that would still allow for some level of overclocking.

These commercially available motherboards offer a wide range of bus speeds and voltage tweaks as well as various options through BIOS or jumpers that allowed the user to get an overclocked CPU running at least as stable as a CPU running at its factory setting. If the CPU manufacturers were indeed concerned about getting lower profit margins due to illegal remarks and computer dealers selling overclocked systems, they would not be selling their chipsets to these motherboard manufacturers; these manufacturers could still be selling overclocked systems to the less-educated user using these tweaks, and collecting a substantially larger profit.