Colin's Tip #7: One last thing to do before we reboot the system and go into the BIOS... Again, go to the "Start" menu, then "Run." There, type MSCONFIG and press enter. It will bring up this window where you should to to the "Startup" tab.

Uncheck everything but what is necessary for Windows to load! All the other check boxes correspond to programs that would load into memory when your computer first starts up.

After that, we're going to restart the computer and enter the BIOS.

Colin's Tip #8: In the BIOS, which will depend on the type of motherboad you have, make sure that all the timings for your RAM are set to the most aggressive settings. Next, overclock the FSB of the system to its max, in my case that's 170 MHz FSB.

Now to show the benefits of a high FSB, I lowered the multiplier to 9.5 so the CPU speed will stay approximately the same; 9.5 x 170 = 1615 MHz. So what do we get after all that work?

The first 3DMark 2001 score was 8277, and this time we've gone up to 8744, not too bad for a few clicks of the mouse and keyboard!

Over a 500 point improvement so far, which should also translate into an overall system performance increase since almost every aspect of the computer is now running faster.

Colin's Tip #9: Next we reboot the computer and go back into the BIOS. Here, I raise the CPU frequency to as high as possible. In our case, the AGNGA Athlon XP 1900+ would do 1.8 GHz stable at a voltage of 1.85V with just simple air cooling.

It seems that the newer steppings are much better overclockers then the older AGKGA's. Our two AGKGA XP1800+'s maxed out at around 1.7 GHz.

Believe it or not with this speedy system we're starting to become videocard limited. Yes, even a GeForce3 Ti500 will suffer this fate! So now that it's become the limiting factor, let's see how the videocard overclocks as well.

Look back at this article or in the Performance Area of our forums for an ATI guide in the near future. Today however, we'll be focusing on nVidia GPU's since that's what I have in m y videocard right now.