Dell OCing

is their any way possible to overclock any dell pc without software OCing or do i have to use software if so could somebody recommend a good program for overclocking
thanks

With a 160 watt power supply you are not going to be able to overclock anything. That is not even high enough wattage to be providing enough stable juice for what you are running as is.

you cannot overclock on a Dell motherboard. It's all locked down. Software might say it is doing it, but it's not.

works just fine not unstable at all (right now at least(murphy's law)) i can overclock my grapjics card jst fine

refer to post #3. you cannot overclock a dell unless it is one of their uber expensive computers (such as the XPS)

the video card is not by dell - so that doesnt count.

160 watts is honestly pushing it very hard. i'm surprised you wrote 160W and hope it is a typo and you actually meant 260 W

but tehnically 160W should be enough for that system at stock settings, but it will not allow for any upgrades or overclocking anyways (astleast not on the cpu - in addition to the fact dells are locked)

no 160w wasnt a typo and my cpu isnt stock it's faster the other was a 2.4GHz my current is a 3GHz HT my hard drive isnt stock either the old one was 80 my new one is 160 my video card isnt stock thats newer much newer than what was in it

yes but dragon fly's point remains valid... What you are running off that 160w power supply is more than most people would wish to run. Put your hand behind the exhaust vent on the power supply, odds are the air is gunna be quite hot which should be an indication to you of how much stress you may be putting on that unit. By calculating the raw numbers is easy to see your system as configured to require more than 150w at load, factor in things like fluctuation in voltage, capacitor aging, typical load on your system, and so forth and its easy to see that 160w power supply as a weak point.

Your 6200 is a rather weak card and its typical power consumption shouldnt be much more than 30-40w. Overclocking it wont have much serious impact on the power consumption of the card. Were not talking about a card like an HD2900xt which alone can eat up 150w or more. The impact the cpu can have is gunna be a bigger hit for you than your 6200 ever will. And power is just one of the limiting factors you have to deal with, you also have to deal with heat, and the limitations of other components such as the memory, motherboard and the cpu it self. If all of these factors are not addressed properly, you will not get a stable overclock, and you risk damage to your system or in some cases even corruption to your data... The difference in power consumption between a P4 2.4 and 3.0 are not huge, but once you start pushing the cpu beyond its limits and start having to increase the voltage to the cpu, its a whole different story. A 3.0 stock can easily consume less power than a 2.4 ghz overclocked to 3ghz, every cpu is different. The power difference between an 80gb and 160gb hard drive are pretty insignificant, your talking about a device that will probably never consume more than 20w of power. Hell I have a server here with 24 hard drives and though they dont consume too much power, it takes dual 750w power supplies to ensure they the system starts up from a cold boot properly. But odds are the difference in your case is only a few watts.

So if your interested in a bios based overclock you would have to identify which board you have, typically stop dell boards will not have any overclocking options in the bios as others have already mentioned. In some cases the motherboards are rebranded from major manufacturers such as Asus and in some of those cases you can simply flash their bios instead of the OEM bios, but I dont recall any specific instances where Dell users have had success with this. HP had a few systems that had high success rates. So your gunna have to do some research if you want to think about that route.
Beyond that, software overclocking is your only option aside from possible pin mods on the cpu.

But I have to restate what others have already cautioned you about, if you want to overclock you can not expect to get much more out of that 160w powersupply. Invest the $40 it will take to get a decent unit and ensure you have addressed the other factors such as hardware limitations and ensure your cpu cooler can handle the increased heat, and that your case is properly ventilated.

So it may be possible to overclock one way or another, but fact remains if you overload your power supply you are going to be in a bad situation. And the performance gained from overclocking may not equal the performance you would gain from adding a bit more memory or upgrading your video card, it really depends on what your expecting this system to do.

My advise would be to upgrade the power supply before going much further. But if you have the means, may as well drop $100 on a cheap Athlon X2 or Intel Celeron E1200 (dual core 1.6), a gig of ram, and a decent motherboard such as those based upon the Nvidia 7050 which can overclock rather well and can all be done via the ntune software. There is only so much you can expect to squeeze from a P4 these days.

hope that helps.

i agree with you on spending the money on a bigger power supply but the only problem is that it's a dimension 4600c which is a slim case therefore their isnt any power supplys bigger than 160w that would fit in this case.
I did what you said and put my hand where my vent is and you said it would be very hot where actually it isnt that hot at all and I cant upgrade my video card any more it the most powerful low profile card i could find

buy a new computer. not worth the investments and it would not increase performance enough to justify the costs.

plus its a dell. build a custom and you'll be in overclocking heaven.

well odds are you may be able to find a SFF power supply that would work, such as the ones used in the older shuttle systems. I have a few laying around in a similar form factor that range up to 300w. And I never said the air would be hot, I just said it was likely based on the load you are putting on the system. Typically dell units are rather weak and once you get close to its maximum load its efficiency goes through the window and thats why the exhaust air can get very hot. And yes, odds are that 6200 is the fastest low profile AGP card you could get your hands on.

Frankly, just as dragon fly said...your much better off just accepting that you cant get much more out of this dell and upgrading to a new pc. Or at least dropping your dell parts into a new case instead of that low profile dell box. That way you can at least upgrade the power supply and video card. You can often find nice cases on sale with a powersupply for $40 locally. Or hell, maybe even just grab a board like this one that takes a socket 478 cpu and allows you to use cheap DDR2 533/667 and will let you use a pci express video card. The board is not much of a clocker but it has the options and you'd be able to play around with it.

But honestly, as you can get a decent board for $50, decent cpu (dual core X2 or low end Core based dual core) for $60, 2gb ddr2 800 for $45 (1gb for $20), and then you can either use onboard graphics (7050 based would be bout as fast as your 6200, new 780G would probably be faster) or drop $50-$70 or so on a decent card such as the HD3650 or HD2600xt, or even 8600GT.

Your dell pc is just in a bad situation for overclocking even if it had the options to do it. You wont stand to gain a whole lot of performance, you wont be upgrading the video card very far, and DDR2 memory is significantly cheaper than DDR memory, you can get 1gb of DDR2 800 for the same price if not cheaper than 512mb DDR400.. Hell its worth pointing out that a new e1200 dual core celeron 1.6 can even out pace my 3.2ghz pentium D... you really oughta think about upgrading.