A lot of people have asked me about the possibilities of overclocking the AL440LX. Before I get into the nitty-gritty, I have to take a minute to let the disclaimer monster rear it's ugly head again. By overclocking your system, the possibility exists that you may damage your computer or lose your data. So, if you overclock, everything is done at your own risk. If your system doesn't work right after you overclock it, stop overclocking it, or try slowing it down. I won't beat the dead horse anymore. Now that that has been taken care of, lets get down to business!
 

There are two ways to overclock your PC:
 

1. Adjust the clock multiplier of your processor.
2. Adjust the bus speed of your motherboard.

The speed of your processor is determined by the two factors listed above. The AL440LX operates at a bus speed of 66 MHz. The clock multiplier varies according to your processor. For example, a Pentium II 300 MHz uses a clock multiplier of 4.5. Processor speed is determined by multiplying the multiplier by the bus speed. Therefore, 66 MHz bus speed times 4.5 equals 300 MHz. Adjusting either number will increase or decrease the speed that your system runs at. So, lets take a look at each of these:
 

1. Adjust the clock multiplier of your processor.

When the Pentium II was first introduced, you could adjust the clock multiplier on it, just like the Pentium processors. However, this quickly led to a problem. The Pentium II 266 MHz processors are very overclockable. Some less than honest vendors decided that it would be a really great idea to remark some PII 266's and sell them as PII 300's. Anyone who owned this motherboard when it first came out will probably remember all the press this received.

Intel's solution to this problem was to lock the clock multiplier on all of their new chips, including the later Pentium II and Celeron processors. Intel determines the speed of the chip during the manufacturing process and fixes the clock multiplier. It is set in the EBL_CR_POWERON register, and passed to the motherboard during the BIOS POST. There are some people who say that you can defeat this lock by covering up one of the pins on the CPU with a piece of tape. However, all this has ever succeeded in in my experience is a CPU pin with tape residue on it.

However, if you have one of the early Pentium II 233 or 266 MHz processors, you have a fairly good chance of being able to overclock it. By going into the configuration mode, you can set the speed of the processor one bin higher (266 or 300 MHz respectively) and pretty much overclock with ease.
 

Intel does not provide any means for adjusting the clock multiplier on this motherboard. Intel is very opposed to any form of overclocking for obvious reasons: they would rather sell you a new motherboard and a new CPU. However, where there's a will there's a way.

H. Oda has written a program called SoftFSB. SoftFSB uses a software solution to adjust the speed of the system clock on your motherboard. On the AL440LX, it allows you to adjust the bus speed from 66 MHz to 80 MHz. So, in the case of a Celeron 466 MHz CPU, this allows you to adjust the processor speed from 466 MHz to a maximum of 560 MHz.

There is a catch to all of this however. By adjusting the bus speed, you are in effect overclocking every component in your system. All of your AGP, PCI, and ISA devices will be overclocked, as well as all of the components installed on the motherboard.

So, the question is, "How high can I go?"

I have been able to run my system reliably with the bus speed set as high as 72 MHz. I've had a few people write me about their experiences with SoftFSB, and confirm the same. Anything higher than that created problems of a nasty kind -- Hard drive errors. My CPU had no problem running with the 80 MHz setting. The IDE controller on the motherboard however, did not agree. Running the system at 80 MHz resulted in a plethora of hard drive errors, including data errors, FAT table errors, inaccurate disk space reporting, and worst of all, Windows Registry Errors. My problems were all correctable with Norton Disk Doctor. Unfortunately, not everyone was as fortunate as me. Two people said that they had to reformat their hard drive and start over from scratch before they could get things to work again.

Bottom Line: The highest setting I recommend using is 72 MHz.

You can download SoftFSB from various places on the internet. I recommend doing a Google search for it and you should find several places. Please note that H. Oda has discontinued support for this program.

To help you with the configuration of SoftFSB, I've included screen shots from my PC. Here are the settings that I use. For the main screen, I've included shots of both the "before" and "after" settings:

If you have any questions or you're having problems getting SoftFSB configured on your machine, feel free to write me. It may take me a day or two to reply, but I do my best to keep up with all of the emails. Enjoy!