Things to Consider

Before blindly trying to overclock your system, there are issues to be thought out. Mainly, is it really worth it?
Yes, overclocking can increase performance of the system. It makes the processor run faster. And if you overclock the system bus, it helps performance even more. Many choose to leave the processor speed alone, but instead overclock the system bus with a lower multiplier. In many cases, this can yield more performance gain than overclocking the chip speed. But, one thing to consider here is that minor MHz gains are not even noticeable by the user in the real world.

There are risks involved. If you're successful, your system will be running faster, as little as it may be. But if you're not, a number of things could happen. It may not work at all, in which case you can, hopefully, just return the settings to normal and try to forget it. In some cases, it may work but crash occasionally or lock up or show other strange errors. You could even lose data on the hard drive. The worst case scenario is that you completely burn up the chip, and that even when returned to normal settings, it refuses to work. This is rare, and usually happens when you get too aggressive in speed hikes, such as trying to overclock a 100MHz chip to 200MHz. Even if overclocking seems to work, there is no telling what harm you are doing to the processor. It may be no problem, but its' sure to reduce the life of the chip, although you might not care because it'll be outdated anyway.

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