# Overclocking for Ubuntu/Linux



## Night-Leopard-800 (Sep 9, 2009)

ARGH!!! After scouring the web, I still can't find a utility or method for overclocking my CPU and my add-in graphics card through Ubuntu! My BIOS doesn't have any options for it, so I am forced to go through Ubuntu. I've tried everything I've found. If anyone has any ideas, my computer is the following

Dell OptiPlex GX200

Pentium III coppermine (mobile version, I'm told, though my computer is a desktop) running at 733 MHz

512MB RAM

graphics: add-in NVidia TNT via PCI Express (clock speed unknown)

OS: Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

Even overclock programs I installed through the WINE Windows emulator did not work. HELP PLEASE?!


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## ZentratheFox (Sep 9, 2009)

Oh the joys of software overclocking.


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## ToeClaws (Sep 9, 2009)

Hmmm... well, a couple thoughts here.  First on the software:

Over-clocking software has always been a little funny with CPUs.  CPUs are best overclocked via the BIOS (or on older systems) by altering DIP switches and jumpers to change board bus speeds and clock multipliers.  Doing it by software tends to yield much less stable results and has limited options.  The only time it does seem to do okay is for GPUs, which were designed more to support software changes to their onboard configs.

Second thought, your hardware:

You're using antique hardware (in computer terms).  Even if you could achieve a very impressive overclock of 30%, the hardware would still be extremely slow, and you would likely notice little improvement.  A coppermine 733 with a TNT card is, overall, about 1/4 as efficient as a Netbook.  

Bonus opinion:

Overclocking very rarely is an end that justifies the means.  Gains in speed are often well under 30% (in fact, often less than 10%), which is negligible.  Doing it with brand new hardware makes no sense since the gains are so small, and since it also can void your warranty.  Doing it with extremely old hardware makes no sense because the gains, even if gigantic, are still to small to make up for the age and lower performance of the hardware.  I think you'd be a lot better off saving up a couple hundred bucks and buying a used Netbook off Ebay, Craigslist or Kijiji.


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## Irreverent (Sep 9, 2009)

Night-Leopard-800 said:


> Dell OptiPlex GX200



MINT runs fine on that (admittedly ancient) platform, Puppy even better.  Why are you overclocking?  You'd be better off throwing some cheap ram at it.


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## Hendikins (Sep 9, 2009)

Irreverent said:


> Why are you overclocking?  You'd be better off throwing some cheap ram at it.



I'd go a step further and suggest retiring it. I don't know about pricing where the OP is, but a "cheapest recommended box short of buying second hand" can be built for as little as 264AUD according to the locals over here (around 228USD).

Far better than tossing RAM in such an old machine - unless of course it is second hand RAM at zero cost or thereabouts.


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## Irreverent (Sep 9, 2009)

Hendikins said:


> unless of course it is second hand RAM at zero cost or thereabouts.



Yeah, that's sort of where I was coming from.  Zero cost ram or the price of a pint for your buddy etc.  

That optiplex with 512mb or more of ram will run MINT or Puppy plus Open Office and FF just fine, inc pigeon, skype etc.  As an internet access terminal, it will do fine.

But overclocking on WINE suggests that the OP is trying to do something in windows that the machine couldn't do in native windows.   And the Bios on that machine (even if uplifted (by floopy disk only!) to A22) (nested parenthesis FTW!  ) is pretty rudimentary.


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## Kivaari (Sep 9, 2009)

If a new computer is too much, you could get a better used computer. I got a 2.4GHz P4 with 1.25GB RAM for $30 at a garage sale. While you probably won't be so lucky, you probably can get something similar on Craigslist for $100-$150. Or you could try Puppy Linux like Irreverent suggested.


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## Night-Leopard-800 (Sep 9, 2009)

Thanks for the posts guys! And I'm really more worried about overclocking the graphics card to where it can smoothly play a YouTube video. I'm relatively satisfied with the CPU speed. And the reason I don't retire it is because

A. I got it for free a few months ago from a  computer repair shop that was giving away about six of them

B. I like it! XD And I put a fair amount of blood sweat and tears so-to-speak into making it work. And if anyone has any advice about installing Windows 98 to the other hard drive, so that I can choose between that and the already-installed Ubuntu 9.04 at startup, that would be great.


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## Runefox (Sep 9, 2009)

Use it for a web / file server, or better yet, throw pfSense on it, toss some good gigabit network cards in and run it as a router.

I'm not even really sure if there are overclocking utilities that would really bring much of anything out of a system like that, particularly seeing as how it's a Dell. Mind you, it's one of their business models (tanks), but still, going from 733MHz to 800MHz probably won't be a huge jump for you, nor is running the RAM at 133MHz rather than 100MHz (if you could get that to be stable), and the TNT2 is certainly not going to give you any more performance than it already is for modern applications. The best thing to do with it isn't to overclock it, but to find some other use for it.

EDIT: I'm not sure if it's the graphics card itself that's the problem if it can't handle a Youtube video. I wonder if Ubuntu 9.04 picked off your card properly and set up hardware acceleration (well, what little is available) or if it's using a framebuffer driver (which is what it sounds like to me). A TNT2 isn't a powerhouse of a video card, but for all intents and purposes, it should be able to handle decoding a Youtube video, since it does offer hardware acceleration, which as far as I remember is far more powerful than an Intel 915GM, which is what my laptop uses, and which plays Youtube videos just fine.


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## ToeClaws (Sep 9, 2009)

Night-Leopard-800 said:


> Thanks for the posts guys! And I'm really more worried about overclocking the graphics card to where it can smoothly play a YouTube video. I'm relatively satisfied with the CPU speed. And the reason I don't retire it is because
> 
> A. I got it for free a few months ago from a  computer repair shop that was giving away about six of them
> 
> B. I like it! XD And I put a fair amount of blood sweat and tears so-to-speak into making it work. And if anyone has any advice about installing Windows 98 to the other hard drive, so that I can choose between that and the already-installed Ubuntu 9.04 at startup, that would be great.



Eeee... first thing to say: DON'T INSTALL WINDOWS 98!  The 9x Windows are obsolete, and unsupported.  They are/were not only unstable, but have a ton of vulnerabilities that are no longer patched.  It's not safe to run them (or any obsolete OS) on a network anymore.  In fact, why would you even need Windows?  Ubuntu can do a hell of a lot more than 98 ever could.

And I also understand you're not wanting to completely retire it.  My ex uses a Pentium II 333 laptop that is 11 years old.  It's used just to occasionally check e-mail and play music, and runs Puppy Linux.  

The thing is though, if you have an old laptop, then you have to accept the fact that there are things that it just cannot do.  Most videos on the Net are based on flash nowadays (Youtube, for example).  Flash is a pathetically inefficient way of showing video, and requires a huge amount of power to animate the video compared to other technologies.  It's common though because it's easy to build for, and is easy to add to just about any modern OS.  To play it smoothly, I'd say the minimum CPU for a windowed flash video would be 1GHz with a fairly decent video card, like mobile Geforce 2.  Even that is iffy at times.


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## Magnafx (Sep 9, 2009)

Runefox said:


> I'm not even really sure if there are overclocking utilities that would really bring much of anything out of a system like that, particularly seeing as how it's a Dell.



           ^This

Id Have to agree, with such a old system it doesent really bring much to the plate in terms of overclocking, even by doing it you still wont be up to par even with the most basic systems that go on ebay for 200$ now adays.

I am a overclocker my self, and in terms of Software OC, I used it once and never again. Personally i stick with BIOS Settings, and IMO MoBo's as old as that might not be able to take the strain of OCing that hardware to the level you might want.


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## Runefox (Sep 9, 2009)

Re Windows 98: Egad, don't install Win9x! If you absolutely must, pop Windows 2k onto it (which actually runs happily on as little as a Pentium-class CPU with 32-64MB of RAM). At least it's a little more up-to-date, and you'll likely find that most things (particularly newer, XP/Vista apps and newer hardware like printers/scanners/etc) will work with it. As ToeClaws pointed out, it'll be risky regardless unless you're sitting behind a router/firewall and are absolutely _paranoid_ about what you use on it.

Personally, I'd also recommend keeping Ubuntu, since it's, well, an actual modern, supported OS that will largely run decently on that hardware (you'll probably want to pass on some features like Compiz and turn off a few services, but this is identical to what you'd have to do on Windows for a system of that age). You're really not going to get much use out of the system as a desktop unless your definition of desktop stops at "Browsing/E-Mail", and that's something Ubuntu does very reliably, and without the whole virus/spyware threat.


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## Night-Leopard-800 (Sep 9, 2009)

Really the only reason I wanted Win9x is because I have an entire second hard drive in the computer, which Ubuntu annoyingly has decided doesn't exist, even though it shows up in the setup process of Ubuntu. And since I have no other use for it, I figured I might as well install Windows on that one. I want to have a dual-boot system so I can choose Windows or Ubuntu at each boot. And I'll try to get 2000. I tried installing XP, but even though the system's resources are more than enough to support it, it blue-screens whenever i try to install it. So I installed Vista XD bad mistake. It stopped running smoothly after about a day, so I uninstalled that and went back to Ubuntu. And I also want windows because overclock utilities (if someone knows how to overclock my computer through its BIOS that's great, but it doesn't appear to have such an option) and other programs dont run under the WINE Windows emulator.


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## Runefox (Sep 9, 2009)

> it blue-screens whenever i try to install it


... Actually, this sounds like one of your hard drives, your memory, or your motherboard may be on the way out. Given that, I'd definitely reiterate my advisory against overclocking. XD


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## ToeClaws (Sep 10, 2009)

OP: Did you mount the second drive in Ubuntu?  You have to assign a mount point to it during install if you want to use it.  You can do so later by entering it into the /etc/fstab (Google "Installing a second hard drive Ubuntu" for some advice there).

Also, I would not recommend Windows 2000 either.  Even though it's leagues better than Windows 98, it is also no longer supported, and thus unsafe to use on a network.  Windows 2000 is almost exactly the same kernel as XP, so imagine a Windows XP with over a year's worth of patches missing.

Your system should be able to install XP - XP's minimum requirements are 64M of RAM, 133MHz CPU (of course, we all know it needs 512M of RAM and over 1GHz to actually run smoothly).  

For WINE support, I suggest going to WINE-HQ and adding their repo to Ubuntu.  Ubuntu's various releases will only use the stable release of something during the beta test time of that release, thus, they lag behind with some of their apps.  WINE is constantly releasing new updates and I find there is a lot more support in the current releases than in the dated Ubuntu archives one.


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## Irreverent (Sep 10, 2009)

OP: to Toeclaws point:  As a "stock" internet browsing/email terminal, an Optiplex will run XPsp3 just fine.  Performance will be poky during boot, but once loaded, it will run without breaking a sweat.  We have over 10K of those machines on our call centre floors.   They do have the 1.7gHz processor, and those can be found for cheap.  

Its not going to work for gaming, drawing or high end number crunching.


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## Azure (Sep 10, 2009)

Wow.  That computer is slower than the first one I ever bought.  When I was 14.  I'm 26 now.  Buy a new one.


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## Runefox (Sep 10, 2009)

I wasn't really recommending Win2k so much as suggesting it as a suitable alternative if that level of performance is really necessary and the risks are mitigated by a good firewall and careful usage. I'd still recommend Ubuntu over even XP at this point, considering what the computer would be used for if running either of these OS'es (internet appliance).


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## Night-Leopard-800 (Sep 10, 2009)

Hmmm... then wtf XD I've tried to install XP on both hard drives, and after I tried that a few times, unsuccessfully, Vista installed successfully and its only downside was its incredible demands, which caused my system to run very slowly. I dunno why XP won't run on this thing! >_< And I'll stick to overclocking the GPU and leave well-enough alone on the CPU. And I'm not so worried about using the second hard drive in Ubuntu as I am installing another OS on it, partially just to do it, know how and be able to say I did it XD this computer is partially just to play around with.


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## net-cat (Sep 10, 2009)

There's no reason Ubuntu or XP shouldn't run very well on that hardware.

Reading over the issues you're having... Ubuntu slow, XP won't load, Vista unusably slow... 

I've got a sneaking suspicion that some part of your hardware is nearing the end of its life span. Random shit like that usually implies a memory issue, though it could be anything. You wouldn't believe some of the crazy shit I've seen those old Optiplexes do at the end if their life.


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## CyberFoxx (Sep 10, 2009)

Hmm, P3 Coppermine eh? If the BIOS doesn't have the options for it, then you can't overclock it. Only some mobo/BIOS combos "broke" the standards that Intel put forth and allowed people to overclock the P3s. (Example: I have two motherboards, same models, different revisions. One BIOS supports overclocking my P3 Coppermines, the other does not.)

And overclocking a nVidia TNT card (Which I'm guessing you meant is in a PCI slot, not a PCIe because the TNT series came out before PCIe was even remotely finalized, plus P3 mobos didn't have PCIe...) won't really do much. Now, if it was a TNT2 and you were able to OC it, you might see a tiny bit of improvement (Max I got with my TNT2 M64 AGP was a 5FPS increase in Quake 2, yay...) but otherwise, it'll just run hotter. Just not worth it IMHO. But, if you want to try, you might be able to try OC'ng it with nvclock but I'm not sure how that'd work with the nvidia-legacy drivers or the opensource nv drivers under Ubuntu. To be honest, I could never get nvclock to work on my 6200. It said it OC'd it, but the nvidia-settings app just displayed the same clocks. Meanwhile the nvidia-settings app would work in OC'ng, once I set the 
	
	



```
[I]Option "Coolbits" "1"[/I]
```
in the [screen] section of the xorg.conf

PS: To see exactly what CPU you do have, just do a 
	
	



```
cat /proc/cpuinfo
```
 under Ubuntu. Plus you can use "lspci" to see exactly what TNT you have.


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## ToeClaws (Sep 10, 2009)

net-cat said:


> ...Random shit like that usually implies a memory issue, though it could be anything. You wouldn't believe some of the crazy shit I've seen those old Optiplexes do at the end if their life.



Agreed - hardware on its last legs can start to do some odd stuff.  If you pop in your Ubuntu CD, there's a an option on the boot menu to run MemTest86 - I suggest doing that to at least see if the memory and IO to memory are running clean.

With the XP install, there's a chance it could also be your version of it.  Remember that XP is almost 10 years old, so there's a vast difference between the original XP install CD, and one that's a XP SP3 install disk.  The one with SP3 slipstreamed into it has more drivers and support, and hundreds (if not thousands) of fixes.


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## Night-Leopard-800 (Sep 10, 2009)

Wow. I guess I'll run the memcheck and make sure I'm not in trouble XD And I guess I'll just wait until I get my new monitor, which will allow me to install my new graphics card, an ATI Radeon X300 express  (discontinued XD but a helluva lot better than what I've got in there now). Thanks for the advice guys! And I'm not ditching this PC until it goes out... cuz I got it for free XD and I like it a lot, and I'm not prepared to buy a new one quite yet XD


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## Runefox (Sep 10, 2009)

Why, exactly, are you planning on putting a Radeon X300 into a P3 733MHz system that may actually be nearing its end?


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## Night-Leopard-800 (Sep 10, 2009)

Because I can always take it out again and put it in the next PC! Thus is the beauty of PCI express


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## Runefox (Sep 10, 2009)

Night-Leopard-800 said:


> Because I can always take it out again and put it in the next PC! Thus is the beauty of PCI express



>_> Actually, that's a PCI card, not PCI-Express (big difference!), and chances are the onboard graphics chipset on any new PC you buy will actually be superior in terms of performance to a PCI-based Radeon X300.


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## AshleyAshes (Sep 11, 2009)

Runefox said:


> >_> Actually, that's a PCI card, not PCI-Express (big difference!), and chances are the onboard graphics chipset on any new PC you buy will actually be superior in terms of performance to a PCI-based Radeon X300.


 
No, he must mean PCI-Express. The X300 is PCI-Express only. However the X300 is nothing but a variant of the Radeon 9600 that's PCI Express native. Being only a 9600 it's pretty far from powerful.

This also means there's not a snowball's chance in hell that X300 will fit in a P3 mobo.


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## hitokage (Sep 11, 2009)

ToeClaws said:


> *2*33MHz CPU


Fixed, although XP doesn't seem to do a speed check, as I once (forever ago) installed it on a Pentium 166, and it worked - please note I only said it worked.



Night-Leopard-800 said:


> Because I can always take it out again and put it in the next PC! Thus is the beauty of PCI express


PCI-E <> PCI or PCI-X (meaning PCI-Express is not compatible with PCI or PCI-X slots)

EDIT:
Random crashes, etc.:
The most likely suspects are - failing power supply (would be a Dell proprietary one in models from that era), failing hard drive, or failing motherboard (bad/failing capacitors would be typical, although ESD damage is always a possibility).


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## ToeClaws (Sep 11, 2009)

AshleyAshes said:


> No, he must mean PCI-Express. The X300 is PCI-Express only. However the X300 is nothing but a variant of the Radeon 9600 that's PCI Express native. Being only a 9600 it's pretty far from powerful.
> 
> This also means there's not a snowball's chance in hell that X300 will fit in a P3 mobo.



Agreed.  As has already been said, the PIII 733 is a great many years off from being a tangible PC for anything other than basic word processing and web usage (not including videos).  You could put a powerful graphics card in it, but... why?  The CPU will be a MAJOR bottleneck in anything you try to play.  If it were something like an Athlon XP 2500 or up, then yeah, there'd still be some reason to go out and stick a Radeon 2600HD in it or something 'cause you could still play a good deal of the games out there, but a PIII 733 is about 1/5th as powerful. 

Let me highlight what you can tolerably do with a PIII 733:



 browsing web pages: YES
  flash videos on the web: NO
 word processing: YES
Spreadsheets: YES
Powerpoint/Impress slideshows: YES
Image editing: YES (but slow filter processing)
Modern games: NO
Ancient games (pre 2001): YES (depending on video card)
Run Puppy Linux: YES
Run Windows XP: YES (but should have at least 512M Ram)
Run Vista: NO (will be horribly slow)
Run Ubuntu: YES (but should have at least 512M Ram)
Windows media, real and MPEG2 videos: YES (depending on video card)
DVD playback: YES (quality and smoothness may depend on the video card)
Highly upgradeable? NO
It is a basic system that you can use for light-duty type computer usage.  It's not useless, but it's not able to do a lot of the things you're talking about doing with it, nor is it really worth doing those things with.  Just to put things into perspective here, when we moved our main datacentre at the University last year, we were *throwing out* Pentium IV systems:  Systems with 3 to 4 times more power than the one that you're trying to work with here.

If you want to turn it into a casual use web browsing system or something to use as a stereo or file store, go for it, but if you want to play games or use it more like a main PC, I'd suggest just saving up for a better one.  You can pick up older Pentium IV machines and Athlons for $100 that are many times more powerful than the 733.


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## AshleyAshes (Sep 11, 2009)

P3 @ 733 has more than enough power for DVD playback, even without decoding acceleration.  I could do it on a P3 @ 500, cake walk.  The DVD Accelerator cards and stuff were for like P200's and such.

It could also do standard def DivX.  Some h.264 but that'd STRONGLY depend on encoding level and scene compexity.  (It'd be easier to stick with DivX/XviD)


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## ToeClaws (Sep 11, 2009)

hitokage said:


> Fixed, although XP doesn't seem to do a speed check, as I once (forever ago) installed it on a Pentium 166, and it worked - please note I only said it worked.



Hmm... you're right.  Was looking through requirement white papers and realized 133MHz was the minimum for Windows 2000.  Doh!  The minimum requirement can be disabled (and is) for some installs, so it is possible to run XP on something slower, though for the sake of sanity, I wouldn't run either of those old OS's on anything less than 1GHz nowadays. 



AshleyAshes said:


> P3 @ 733 has more than enough power for DVD playback, even without decoding acceleration.  I could do it on a P3 @ 500, cake walk.  The DVD Accelerator cards and stuff were for like P200's and such.



Depends on the OS and software though.  In XP, with a good DVD playback program like CyberDVD, yeah, a PIII 500 would probably manage okay.  In Ubuntu or Puppy, I've found it can really vary depending on the video driver below the 1GHz mark.  It _shouldn't_ matter, I agree, but occasionally it does, hence I just go the safe route and give it a nay for anything sub 1GHz.  I'll edit my response appropriately though.

And wow... DVD accelerator cards, I remember those!  A lot of them really sucked for quality, but they were big sellers when Pentium II's were the mainstay.  I always thought ATI's cards did DVD best back them though with that native media player they had.


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## Carenath (Sep 13, 2009)

Continued Here... http://forums.furaffinity.net/showthread.php?p=1218119
Closed...


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