Vostro 1500. Is it safe and ethical to OC it?

Hello,

I have been the proud owner of a Vostro 1500 for about 2 months now, and I am loving it. However I'd like to tweak it a bit for squeeze more performance out of it - however, I've run into a delimna. Is it ethical to OC? Because to me it seems that OC gets you more performance than what you paid for.. I know this sounds silly, but I am nervous and confused about doing it. I've read about the methods/programs to perform these procedures, but my conscious is eating me alive on the issue, as I've never OC'd before. Please share with me your views. Thanks.

 

Are you talking about OC'ing the CPU or GPU????

 

Yeah this really has nothing to do with ethics. Once you buy the pc its your hardware and your property and there isn't anything illegal about overclocking.

 

I've never heard of anyone holding back from OCing because of ethics and morals eating them up inside...

There's no laws against it, you're not doing anything illegal. It's your notebook. You can do whatever you want with it.

But if you fry something by doing this, then don't expect your warranty to be intact and fix things. So do this at your own risk, but there is nothing unethical about it.

Think about athletes. God gave them a body, and they took that body and worked hard to make it perform better than how it came initially. There's nothing wrong with that, you're not being unethical or cheating anyone. Or think about people in general. They go to schools and learn things above and beyond what they were born with. Is is unethical to go to school and make yourself better, smarter and able to accomplish things better than others?

 

adinu is right

also, it's like tuning your engine's car...it's legal but your car won't stay protected by warranty

 

it is ethical and unethical at the same time. it is unethical, because u get what u paid for lol even more unethical would be an attempt to exchange the fried hardware for a brand-new product. it is ethical in a sense that companies know about the overclockability of their products, and if they really wanted to stop u - they most def. would...
everybody got their own standards they live by though....

 

overcloking the card is kinda like an athlete taking steroids, which is not ethical in my book. i'd still do it (overclock), if i feel the need tho lol

 

Well, I noticed you have 1.5gb ram, try bumping it to 2 gigs. Not only will you get more memory, but it will be faster because of dual channeling.

Thats a quick easy way to boost performance for cheap.

 

For clarification, this deals with OC'ing both GPU and CPU

 

Thanks format.

I guess it'll be ok to OC =) I'll provide benchmarks this evening when I get off work.

 

You'll be fine OCing. Also, not that if you OC, you void whatever warranty you have as far as I know! So, even though you are getting more performance, Dell won't have to provide support if you break something. Just keep that in mind.

Whether or not Dell would know if you OCed or not would be another question, which may involve skewing the truth, which may be unethical.

 

What illegal substance are you applying to your GPU or CPU to make it work faster?

Most of us are running a chip at a higher timing than specced.
This is little more than a coach asking something to run a bit faster or showing a legal technique which allows a runner to take better advantage of his physical abilities.

Steroids are illegal and unethical because:
-They damage the people who use them
-They are an unfair advantage in competitive sports.

Nvidia (or AMD) sold you a chip.
You asked the chip to run faster.
It really is that simple.

The whole "I am getting more than I paid for" being wrong is scary...
Nvidia does not own you.
Your ingenuity added to their tool is worth something and when you add it to the tool you bought you deserve a return.

 

isn't overclocking sort of not approved by the monsters?! run faster? hmm... i agree, but then u slow down and everything comes back to normal, unlike overclocking, if u do it, it remains there and if it is stable, then there's no reason to go lower again, kinda like steroids. u take them, no side effects, cool, u just keep on using them until ur leaver or something else gives up.

so does overclocking in the long-run....and don't tell me it doesn't cuz "the card has been designed to run u for more than 10 yrs, which is more than enough, and ocing will only cut it so short"...so what? it still does, doesn't it?

never said that

 

And yet, Nvidia supplies OCing tools and just re-enabled OC on its newest series drivers. You do so at your own risk, but frankly they don't care.
If you manage to blow up your card, you will have to buy a new one right?

"Not approved" and "forbidden" are two different things.
They are legally bound to "not approve" it so people running insane overclocks cannot claim that the card was "designed" to run at a 500% overclock and then claim warranty...

You understand that HEAT is what damages the chips and that even under normal operating procedure, it still damages it. At stock clocks it lasts 10 years, at OC'd speeds it may last 9... the "damage" done to it is really dependant on how closely they specced the defaults. Judging by how well the equipment I OC'd 10 years ago still runs, I'd say they were quite conservative.

This is leaving out the most important point...
That chip is a tool and quite a bit less important than a person.
I break tools all the time.
Nobody drags me off to jail and I certainly don't feel guilty for "killing" that screwdriver because I was tired of having my hand torn to shreds trying to reach around that corner and modded it to get the job done.

 

Sorry for not being helpful but thats the first time i've seen ethical and OC in the same sentence

 

lol! same here.....i kind of have to OC my 3 year old MR 9700 to get anything out of it

 

Overclocking is just pushing your hardware to its actual potential. When chips are made, they don't all come out running at 475MHz (for example - 8600m GT). They all have different maximum potential speeds, but they have to bin them at set frequencies so everyone has the same.

Typically as the yield increases and over time, the actual speeds at which the chips can run are drastically increased, thus improving probability of a significant overclock. That's why you'll see the same chip later in production bumping up actual marketed clock speeds from say 475MHz to 550MHz even though its the same chip.

Nothing morally wrong with overclocking. It's just that it is considered running "out of spec" so if you fry your components it won't be covered by your warranty. The risk of that happening these days is nearly nothing. Worse thing that happens is that your system locks up - just an indicator its being pushed too hard and time to drop the clock speeds a bit.

That being said. Just keep mind of your system temperatures as that is usually what can kill PC components over time.

One more thing. If you intend on gaming with a notebook PC, you're best to undervolt your CPU to drop temparatures, and overclock your GPU. Usually the CPU and GPU are on the same heatsink/heatpipe, so dropping your CPU temperature will drop your GPU temperature and possibly allow for a slightly faster GPU overclock. Not to mention overall cooler temperatures.

I undervolted my T7500 2.2GHz CPU (I think 1.1875 @ 11x multiplier) and overclocked my 8600m GT DDR2 GPU to 590/490 (even though it was stable at 605 / 510 - just to avoid lockups) and runs less than 65C. My results push it much higher than a standard clocked DDR3 8600m GT.