Introduction

You’ve been sitting around with that Celeron for almost two years and you finally decided to upgrade to a shiny new Pentium 4 system. You wanted to go with an Athlon, but horror stories about chips breaking and incompatibility issues bogged you down. You feel you need to stick to tried and true tactics so Intel was your best bet. But now that your system’s up and running, you feel that it’s not quite up there with the Jones’. Don’t fret. This article will guide you through the process of whipping your system into shape.

Currently, there are a few flavors of the Pentium 4 on sale at your local computer store with the 1.7GHz version being the mightiest. We’re going to be working with the 1.7GHz version because Intel has cut its prices for Pentium 4 processors by a significant amount, making high-end Intel purchases possible.

Here’s what we’ll be taking a look at in this article:

Replacing the current CPU to a shiny new 1.7GHz Pentium 4,
Optimizing the heatsink for better performance,
Replacing the heatsinks on the video card,
Overclocking the CPU,
Overclocking the video card,
Optimizing the system for game performance,
Benchmarking the system.

If you haven’t read my guide on the Pentium 4’s core technology, please read it before continuing as it will explain a few points about what I’ll be doing in this article, and why.

Optimization Friendly

The Pentium 4 is one of the best processors out there to optimize because of its long pipelines. Having deeper pipelines with more stages means that the Pentium 4 can increase in speed rather easily.

A pipeline is like an assembly line. Chunks of data pass through the pipeline going through stages. In the P6 architecture, there were 10 stages. In Intel’s new Hyper Pipeline Technology, there are 20 stages. What does this all have to do with increasing processor speed? Well, to increase processor speed, you have to make it do less per clock cycle, that is, per Hz. You may now be asking, “Well doesn’t a 10-stage pipeline have to do less work than a 20-stage pipeline?” The quick answer is no, it doesn’t.

What I mean by doing less work is that since the pipeline is longer, it will also take longer for instructions to be processed all the way to the end of the pipeline. With the P6 pipeline, the processor could do, let’s say 3 stages per clock cycle. Now let’s say with Hyper Pipeline, the Pentium 4 also can do 3 stages per cycle. The Pentium 4 now does 3 out of 20 whereas the P6 did 3 out of 10 -- 50% work per clock cycle. If you design a processor to do less per clock cycle, it is able to reach much higher speeds than processors that do more per clock cycle. This is the reason why Intel released the Pentium 4 at such high speeds. If they were releasing another Pentium III processor, it would likely be only around 1.2GHz. Obviously Intel has the capabilities to create multi GHz processors -- evident with the Pentium 4 -- it's just that the P6 architecture has reached its limits.

Now that we know why the Pentium 4 can reach high speeds, we’ll attempt to put that theory to practice.

Upgrading the System

This section may or may not be an upgrade for you. If you have deep pockets, maybe you’ll be upgrading from a 1.3GHz, 1.4GHz, or even a 1.5GHz Pentium 4. If this is your first Pentium 4 system, that’s okay too as most of this article applies to both sides of the field.

The system we’re using was manufacturer last year around November and it’s now six months passed. In the computer world, six months means that your computer isn’t up to par anymore. I know it’s sad, but that’s just the way technology moves -- forward.

So let’s take a look at what we have in the current system:

Intel 1.5GHz Pentium 4 processor,
Intel D850GB Desktop reference motherboard,
256MB PC800 Samsung RDRAM,
NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra 64MB DDR,
IBM Deskstar 75GXP 30GB UltraATA/100 7200RPM,
Hitachi GD-7000 12X DVD ROM,
Intel EtherExpress PRO 100+ Ethernet Adapter,
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live!

Already I’m seeing some things that need to be addressed. First, we need to get the processor up as high as possible. Second, we need to set the motherboard on setup mode so that we can change some of the advance functions inside the BIOS that Intel hides. Other than that, everything else can stay the same.

As you’ve probably concluded, this system upgrade is going to be for the hardcore gamer who may or may not be a diehard Intel fan. At any rate, the things that I’ll be doing in this article can be applied to almost any user, whether the process is done on an Intel or AMD system.

Basically what we have here is really the processor and graphics card holding us back from ultimate gaming performance. With a speedier overclocked Pentium 4 and GeForce2 Ultra, we’ll be able to claim our own in any frag session. Although the 1.4GHz Pentium 4 is fast, it’s not fast enough and does get beat by faster Pentium 4’s and equally clocked Athlon processors.