How to overclock Dual-Core CPU E5200? Lacking options in BIOS?

This is serious problem.

I want to speed up my compilation process.

I have never been special fun of overclocking, however time of compilation of my current project makes my crazy!

I found information about which parameters I should change during overclocking, which values are quite safe.

However I have one basic problem. I don't have possibility of changing this option in my BIOS.

It is possible, that I have blocked some some options by our sysadmins (as you can imagine.. this is not the best idea to ask him about help, and no, I will not get better CPU, if I will ask).

so, question is simple:

How to edit proper values to overclock my CPU. Do I need flash my bios to another version?

my stuff:

HP Compaq dx7500 Microtower
Pentium Dual-Core Cpu E5200 @2.5GHz
Ubuntu 10.4 LTS/Windows XP SP3

BIOS Information
       Vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
       Version: 5.07  
        BIOS Revision: 8.15

Base Board Information
        Manufacturer: PEGATRON CORPORATION
        Product Name: 2A84h
        Version: 1.03

overclocking

noisy

Posted 2010-12-13T14:33:17.560

Reputation: 53

Answers

May I apologize first for not really answering your question, but here are my suggestions...

1/ I don't think you are actually able to overclock the machine anyway given the custom BIOS from HP/Compaq.

2/ I would not recommend overclocking the machine for compilation either. How big is your source tree and on what platform are you trying to compile? (Windows/Linux?) Overclocking tends to make the system unstable and it is very easy to simply segfault the program and you don't really know if the problem is due to hardware or software.

3/ If the program is big enough that makes productivity drop i think you should try to get access to some computational resources (e.g. access to a central server with reasonably high computation power and compile/cross-compile there), or talk to your boss.

4/ Overclocking esepecially on a E5200 isn't going to get you very far. Most reports tops at around 3.2GHz (from 2.5GHz), even with aftermarket cooler. I doubt that you are able to install an aftermarket cooler in a company machine... and with such low overclock you are not getting anywhere much better....

bubu

Posted 2010-12-13T14:33:17.560

Reputation: 9 283

All valid points, good answer, +1 – Sathyajith Bhat – 2010-12-13T14:52:27.583

ad.2. it depends, but often few hundreds MB (>500MB) – noisy – 2010-12-13T14:53:45.833

ad.3. we have some kind of Incredibuild for Linux, but still linking must be done on my local machine. Unfortunately I also often have to make whole rebuilds. It can take 20-30 minutes :/ ad.4. Even 0.5GHz more on each core, can give better result. 2-4 minutes less on each compilation will give some effects. – noisy – 2010-12-13T15:00:14.670

@noisy - have you tried distcc? – bubu – 2010-12-14T08:23:23.363

I am not sure, if we use exactly this, but I am sure that we have something similar... – noisy – 2010-12-21T09:51:26.747

Google "Pin modding" and your processor model, this is sort of a hardware hack, and is specific to each processor, not all processors have a tutorial on pin modding them, be careful, it can be risky business.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=pin+modding+e5200

Moab

Posted 2010-12-13T14:33:17.560

Reputation: 54 203

thanks for answer, however I think this is to risky in my situation. – noisy – 2010-12-13T17:00:07.780

Its the only way to do it if the HP bios does not have the necessary tools, sorry. – Moab – 2010-12-13T17:04:24.460