S460 undervolted / overclocked to 2.054 GHz!

Greetings fellow S4XX owners!

Here's some screenshots of CPU-Z showing my S460 undervolted to a maximum of 1.1 volts, and overclocked to 2.054 GHz! That's a 325 MHz overclock over stock CPU speeds (1.729 GHz), while still dropping Vcore over 2.5 volts from the stock setting to reduce heat and power consumption. The addition of 533 MHz DDR2 SDRAM is now finally paying off!

Care to know how it's done?

 

OK, how do you get the CPU to run at 2 Ghz? I'm not aware of a way to do that other than switching CPUs. I know you used to be able to change jumpers on the chip, but pretty sure you can't do that anymore.

 

The first picture provides a clue, and I'll tell you that there were no hardware modifications made, except for upgrading the RAM with two 1GB DDR2 PC4200 sticks from OCZ...

...Don't worry - I'll post a full guide tomorrow on how to do it. It's too late for me to get to it tonight.

 

Okay, now to answer the question of how this was done...

Undervolting

If you're not familiar with this term, it is the process of lowering the voltage applied to the CPU for the purposes of decreasing heat generation and battery usage. Undervolting is possible because the voltage recommendations are often set using first generation CPUs that have not been fully optimized for the particular process used in their fabrication. Later CPUs often have much greater tolerances and can be powered at lower voltages.

There are a couple of programs out there that will allow you to do this for Centrino notebooks:

RMClock - http://cpu.rightmark.org/products/rmclock.shtml

NHC (Notebook Hardware Control) - http://www.pbus-167.com/chc.htm

Note: NHC used to be called CHC for Centrino Hardware Control, but I guess it's become more generally applicable.

There are several guides out there that detail how to use these tools which I will defer to, but if there are enough people interested I will post a more detailed guide on how to use them.


Overclocking

There are very few methods in which the processors in laptops can be overclocked. I don't know of any laptop motherboard that supports overclocking in the BIOS like a lot of desktop boards do. That leaves only a couple of tricks for the user to try. The first is doing a pin modification of the CPU to fool the BIOS into thinking that, for example, a 400 MHz FSB processor is actually a 533 MHz FSB processor. Since the S4XX series already use a 533 Mhz FSB, this is of no use.

The second method, which is generally applicable to a wider range of both desktops and laptops, is to reprogram the clock generator on the motherboard to run the core clock (from which the CPU, Front Side Bus (FSB) and memory bus clocks are derived) at a higher speed. This is exactly the same as changing the clock speed in the BIOS of a desktop board, except it is done on the fly while the OS is running instead of a POST time.

There are three different programs out there that can do FSB adjustments on the fly:

CPUCool (and CPUFSB) - http://www.cpu-cool.de/

SetFSB - http://www13.plala.or.jp/setfsb/

ClockGen - http://www.cpuid.org/clockgen.php

The catch to using any of the programs is that they have to support the specific clock generator chip for the laptop you want to overclock, and there are hundreds of different clock generator chips, all of which operate differently from the next, which is why this method of overclocking is not generally applicable to every laptop out there.

Each of these programs supports a varied set of clock generators. Not knowing which one was in the S460, I tried various combinations of these programs and none of them worked. I decided to open up the case and find the clock gnerator through visual inspection, and of course the chip was located on the underside of the motherboard so I had to completely take the laptop apart to get to it. The chip ended up being an ICS 954227, which none of the programs supported yet.

I contacted the authors of these programs, and two of them were willing to update their programs to support this clock chip. Wolfram Podien, the author of CPUCool / CPUFSB, and Abo, the author of SetFSB were both gracious enough to update their programs and send me test copies, which I'm happy to report to you today work perfectly fine with the S460.

Both authors will be updating their sites with the new versions sometime in the future, but for now I've attached a copy of SETFSB for the S4XX series for you to play around with. I've also attached a screenshot of the this program with the settings I used to achieve the 2.054 GHz overclock.

Have fun!
-Robert Hildinger

 

By the way, be sure and post here the speeds you are able to achive through overclocking. It will be interesting to see just how overclockable the CPU in the S-series is...

 

Okay i got the 2055.3 MHZ figure on my S380 but once I restart the notebook it comes back to 1729 MHZ . Is there any way I can set it to be permanent ?

 

I don't know if you can with SetFSB, but CPUCool and CPUFSB both will allow you to reset to the new frequency at Windows startup automatically, although you hav to purchase the program to do it. As soon as Wolfram posts the S4XX (and apparently S3XX, considering your post) version on his website, I'll post a message in this thread.

p.s. Have you upgraded the memory in your S380, or is it stock?

 

Its not stock , I bought 2 X 512 MB DDR2 PC3200 Elpida sticks when I purchased the notebook . I ran 3dmark03 after setting the speed to 1989 MHZ to see if there was any improvement in the scores and there certainly was and not a small one by any means .
So this thing is not bad at all , although it did almost kill my lappy when I ran 3dmark03 with the speed set to 2055 MHZ but still 1989 MHZ is not that bad a figure .

Good job.

 

I was just a leg man in this. The real thanks go to Abo of SETFSB and Wolfram Podien of CPUCool / CPUFSB...

I was curious to see if the addition of PC4200 memory had any effect on how far you could overclock the processor. I was afraid those with PC3200 memory wouldn't be able to overclock vary far, but you got a pretty decent extension.

Are you undervolting the processor as well? When I started this I had the processor undervolted all the way down to .968 volts at 1.73 GHz, but I had to bump it up to 1.1 volts to achieve a 2.05 GHZ clock setting.

 

Nice work,

Bad news...only took the fsb to 160.1MHz...was trying to hit the 166MHz of the next gen Intel but not even close!

Good news...SuperPi times were better by 7 to 8 seconds for 1,000,000 digits. Started with 43's ended with 35's.

Both Sandra CPU benchmarks also saw a marked inprovement.

3D03 scores with an OC on both components...3200s to 3300s.

I am hoping that when i pick up a floppy and flash the bios i will hit 3400s or if i'm lucky 3500s.

Thanks Slinger

PS what kinda scores you seeing on 3D03?

 

By setting the frequency at 222/740 the processor speed came out to be 1989 MHZ which was pretty decent and surprisingly i had not undervolted my lappy and I kept on checking the fan while it was set to 1989 MHZ and honestly it seemed all okay to me , no extra heat or anything . Oh and by the way i got a score of 3316 on 3dmark03 with the processor clocked at 1989 MHZ .

 

Okay this thing is pretty effective and I was wondering if I could use a similar approach to overclock my prescott . Can anybody help me out on that ?

 

What motherboard are you using with your prescott? All of the FSB clock adjustment tools I mentioned have support for certain specific motherboards, so you might see if you can find one that directly supports yours. IF that doesn't work you'll have to look at the motherboard directly and try to identify the clock chip visually. Once you do that you can see if any of the tools support that particular chip. CPUCool / CPUFSB appears to support the largest range of chips...

-Robert Hildinger

 

I saw your post over on MVKTECH about this. I assume you're talking about flashing the video BIOS right? So how is this going? Have you had any luck figuring out the best way to go about flashing the BIOS? I noticed after creeping around in the S460 system BIOS that it contains the video BIOS embedded inside, so I wonder if it's even possible to flash the video BIOS directly, or does it have to be implanted in a system BIOS via the Phoenix BIOS Editor, and then flashed.

-Robert

 

What i am going to do is do a force flash with nvFlash 5.13 when i get a floppy. If for any reason it doesn't work i will have a backup disk so that i can forceflash with the backup disk via a autoexe.bat file in case i can't see anything.

I wouldn't mind a copy of the 560 system bios to mess around with either but so far the Sony site doesn't have one for download. I have done it before with a desktop video and optical drives and the procedure seemed pretty simple. If i have a backup floppy then i'm not too worried.

Due to my lack of knowledge regarding video cards i don't have a full understanding on how the improvements are realized. It would be nice to know how or if the firmware will allow for further overclocking of a card if the card remains physically the same. I mean from what i have read on the internet the two cards are physically the same yet the 6200 only clocks to 400/700 while the 6400 starts at those values and clocks even higher.

 

Slinger,

Great thread and many thanks for the information. Two question: (1) any idea of the mainboard manufacturer and model for the S460PB; and (2) any idea when Wolfram will be releasing an updated version of CPUCool with the correct PLL figures. I just purchased his excellent program and lookforward to running my Vaio at 2055--Who would have thought?

 

Is the setFSB support for S480 ?

thanks.

 

I believe that it should be the same. The S480 is basically only a customizable S460.

I am curious if the S560 will work with it.

EDIT: Works on S5.

 

Thanks for info Slinger !

I was able to hit 2.03 with my S460 Average temperature of 52 ~ 54 C with NHC of Performance setting !!

 

Only problem is that I have to set up clock speed each time I boot my Laptop

 

Actually, if you download the latest version of SetFSB from http://www13.plala.or.jp/setfsb/download/beta/setfsbU15a1_VaioVGN-S460.zip and check out the instructions, you'll see that there is support for command-line options that allow you to set FSB speed outside of the GUI. All you have to do is create a shortcut that executes SetFSB with the appropriate command line options for the FSB you want, and then place that shortcut in your startup folder. Now your FSB will be set every time you boot!

-Robert Hildinger