The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
I have answered this via many PMs.. I will post here.. You can follow Moo's link too. He has laid out a great tutorial..
Ok here are the steps I took on my q9000:
When you see the Alien head when turning on your M17x hit f2 to enter the bios setup of the computer
Move over to the advanced menu in the bios > then to overclocking
enter down to where it says Linked and changed that to unlinked
Now you have the ability to change FSB and mem timings. I only changed the FSB and left the MEM timings alone for now... You can set them both to the same setting if your trying to stabilize your system some.. I didnt have to and actually had the reverse effect when doing a 1:2 ratio (setting fsb and mem to same setting). So the default for my system was 1066 in mem timings.. just leave it there.
Now this is where every processor can be different and your results may not be like mine... I raised the FSB up until I couldnt run stable any longer and backed it back down to the highest stable setting. On my chip it was 1285 in the fsb field. This sets the FSB at 321.25 MHz which clocks my processor at 2.4 GHz
Anything higher and it wasnt stable for me. Some people have been able to raise the FSB to a higher setting that resulting in 2.5 GHz and some ppl havent been able to get as high as mine... You can start off with just 1285 if you want and then save your changes and exit the bios. You do this in the far right exit menu...
****** Now if at anytime you cant get your system to boot at all after changing these settings, you will have to flip over the laptop, take out the battery, remove the back vent cover and unplug the bios battery right there (easy to see) and then plug them back in. This resets all bios settings.
Download OCCT (google it) and let it run for 1 hr. If it runs for one hour without any freezes or BSOD, your probably stable. You then can raise it some if you want to go higher or leave alone.. If OCCT locks up or you get BSOD you will need to go back into the BIOS and reduce the FSB.. You can do it in 10 increments.. lower to 1275,1265 ect...
Do note that you may not be able to overclock to 2.4GHz. This is because every single processor is unique and even with the same part number (Q9000) some will overclock higher than others. My Q9000 for example will not go above 2.55GHz without crashing. You may have got lucky and got an overclockable one, or may be unlucky and have got one that's not very overclockable.
Why go for 2.4GHz though? It
should be able to hit 2.5GHz. As said above...go into the BIOS, raise the FSB speed to whatever you wish (for 2.5GHz, it's 333MHz), save settings, boot, and run OCCT for an hour to see if it's stable. After that lower it if it's too high (i.e. bluescreen or crash while running OCCT) or raise it if it's stable and temps are low enough.
You know what is very strange? I had problems with my FSB set to 1285 similar to benthedogtrainer. It sat stable through 3dmark06 and occt, then it crashed when i was playing l4d and would be very screwy with the reboot. I decided to do full system restore and OC'ed it to the same exact spec, ran tests and been gaming on it ever since.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
