[McKnight]

I have been playing Doom 3 on my computer for about 3 months now. I have recently heard about something called overclocking and how it could limit the life of my PC. I have a few questions regarding overclocking:

1) Does it involve just the CPU going over the designed Ghz?
2) How often does one have to overclock to limit the life of a PC significantly?
3) How does one actually overclock (i.e. examples if possible)
4) Will my PC be forced to "overclock" with Doom 3 on medium settings given the following specs:

Pentium 4
CPU: 3.0 Ghz
RAM: 1 GB
Video: Radeon X300

Thank you very much for your time...

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1) yes 2)Depends how much you overclock 3)In the bios you up the voltage and change settings 4)No,
If you are having issues running Doom3 it definitly isnt the processor thats the problem area - its your video card. Your cpu should run Doom3 no problem. My 2.0 P4 runs COD2,HL2,BF1&2 with no problems. And most of those I run at max or close to max settings.
Heres my advice to you, dont mess with your puters cpu, its fine @ 3.0Ghz, save up and get a BAD@SS video card, youll immediatly notice that all of your games will be able to run @ max settings with little or no frame rate loss.
As for video cards get bare minimum 256 ram, preferrably 512 but as youll notice the price jump from one to the other is pretty severe. Then it all comes down to preferance, ATi or Nvidia.
-Pete.

[p-zero]

1) yes 2)Depends how much you overclock 3)In the bios you up the voltage and change settings 4)No,
If you are having issues running Doom3 it definitly isnt the processor thats the problem area - its your video card. Your cpu should run Doom3 no problem. My 2.0 P4 runs COD2,HL2,BF1&2 with no problems. And most of those I run at max or close to max settings.
Heres my advice to you, dont mess with your puters cpu, its fine @ 3.0Ghz, save up and get a BAD@SS video card, youll immediatly notice that all of your games will be able to run @ max settings with little or no frame rate loss.
As for video cards get bare minimum 256 ram, preferrably 512 but as youll notice the price jump from one to the other is pretty severe. Then it all comes down to preferance, ATi or Nvidia.
-Pete.

[McKnight]

Thanks pete for the info. One more thing if I may my friend:

In coclusion, overclocking is done only by changes I make then? Overclocking will not manually take place without making the changes; so therefore by playing Doom 3 I am not overclocking on my computer, even at the highest settings?

And lastly, a video card has nothing to do with overclocking?

Thanks again. I really appreciate your help...

[warriorscot]

No you can overclock the video card, and pete for the last time im telling you its a physical impossibility with that graphics card to run most of those games at high settings its just not possible if it is you have some kind of magic 6200 thats faster than a 6800.

[McKnight]

Thank you very much for your reply...

[warriorscot]

Vid overclockings probably the easiest to do there is lots of good software for doing it, there ATI tool in my sig if you want to look it up for doing it, although the performance boost usually isnt huge from most gfx cards since they allready usually run near there limits.