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This may sound kind of dumb but I curious.
I have a Lenovo T400 laptop with an Intel T9400 CPU.
Would it be possible to overclock my notebook?
Would it be a really dumb thing to do?
I would imagine it could blow the thing up since it has very limited cool ability.
ianc1215
Posted 2011-12-30T10:20:12.637
Reputation: 2 884
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In general it's possible to overclock laptops and the ability to do so mainly depends on support is overclocking software used.
The chances of it blowing up are very small (mostly because only component that can explode is the battery).
As for cooling, laptops have in general pretty advanced temperature throttling systems so you should in general be safe. The most important thing when overclocking is same as on desktops: Monitor your temperatures and see how far they go during stress testing and be aware of temperature limits on of the system.
It is generally good idea to do some stress testing before actually trying to overclock. This should give you an idea how good the cooling on your laptop is and you'll be able to determine if it's smart to try to overclock the system further.
Also note that on many laptops (I'm not sure about yours) the cooling system is shared among CPU, chipset, internal DC-DC converters and GPU so be sure to stress test both GPU and CPU at the same time if you plan to play games with overclocked hardware.
AndrejaKo
Posted 2011-12-30T10:20:12.637
Reputation: 16 459
Well its not so much that I want to play games. I use VMware Workstation on the laptop and it a little slugish because I can only give up 1 CPU core to VMware. I was either going to invest in a quad core cpu or think about overclocking the current cpu. Still thinking a quad core is the way to go. – ianc1215 – 2011-12-30T10:46:02.190
@Solignis Quad core is definitely the way to go. As for overclocking, you can't know until you try. – AndrejaKo – 2011-12-30T11:21:59.090
Thats what scares me. I am going to have to post another question as I do not want this one to get off topic, thanks. – ianc1215 – 2011-12-30T11:31:06.640
At 2 large overclocking sites on the web, the concencus has generally been a dont bother attitude. They are mobile chips, the bioses dont give a lot of control, and the actual percentage change when you can not vastly improve the cooling. that said SETFSB and CLOCKGEN are 2 software hacks that some laptops can be tweaked with, when bios adjustment is not available. AndrejaKo covered the rest. You could cause more problems than laptops can already have :-) – Psycogeek – 2011-12-30T13:34:11.937