Overclocking For Dummies (new owners)

Hi there! New member here and a newbie to Alienware products.

First off, I would like to say that this is a great site and the fact that everyone is so helpful in answering questions without out the fear of being bashed is a breath of fresh air. With that said, there are just so much information here that I'm on info overload right now

I will be receiving my M11x R1 tomorrow and have been searching and reading up on Overclocking it. I have never messed with BIOS or the such at all, but am all for trying it out if I can improve the performance on this latpop. I will mainly be using this laptop for surfing, watching HD movies and just some lite gaming so it won't be anything radical. I have found many, many threads that mentions overclocking but nothing that actually have step by step instructions for a newbie like me that has never done it before.

Is there a thread on this site that someone can put me to (I have searched and found nothing), or if this doesn't exist, can someone put something together so that I (and future newbies) can follow to overclock this machine?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Edit: My post below is for an R2, sorry I overlooked that you were asking about a R1. I'll leave the info below as a reference for others, but note that it is for a R2. Thanks]

Short OC guide:

- Reboot
- Hit F2 when you see the alien head logo
- Once in the BIOS right arrow to the Advanced menu
- Scroll down to CPU Overclock and hit Enter
- Scroll down to 166MHz and hit Enter
- Hit F10 to save settings and reboot
- If you manage to boot to the desktop then you're going to want to stress test your system at the bus frequency you've chosen.
- If you get a BSOD then reboot and try the next lower setting for CPU OC.
- Once you've booted successfully, download and install Prime95.
- Fire up Prime95 and run the In-place large FFTs torture test.
- Go watch a movie and eat dinner as you're going to want to let Prime95 run for at least a few hours.

If your system doesn't freeze or BSOD then you're probably OK at the setting you've chosen in the BIOS.
To further test, play a game or two for a few hours, preferably something that will utilize multiple cores. This will get your CPU and GPU going at the same time.
Rinse and repeat until you find the frequency that's stable for you.


(copied from a message that Slickie88 put together)

Cheers,
Stain

 

Hit F2 when it starts up, go to the appropriate tab (it'll say Overclock Disabled), select Disabled, hit Enter, change to Enabled, hit Enter, hit F10, save changes, reboot.

Done. It's a very painless process. Just go slow and you'll be fine.

Edit: yeah, what that dude said above me.

 

Since you are getting an R1, TalonH's instructions are the ones that apply. Stain's are for the R2.

 

Wow that's it? Thanks!

So from my research, it looks like most people prefer MSI Afterburner. This is the program that actually overclocks it right?

 

Thanks Stain. I did search with the keyword "Overclocking" and there were 11 pages that I went through.

Good idea to leave this here for the R2 newbies!