Overclocking Macbook Pro - NOT THE GPU!!!

man you are just begging to have your warranty voided.....

i kind of doubt its the same hardware. it wouldnt be logical for a company to put all the same stuff in a machine and just but limitations on it then charge less when they worked more to do it.

while i totally understand why you are thinking this i am not to sure that it is that way and if so apple is wasting money (they could just charge 250 more across the board and not limit the 2.6 processor to 2.5 if that is the case.

and ya the whole warranty voiding plus your time and effort to do it will not be worth the differance
-matt

Intel used to test the best speed in lots of chips then rate the chips at that speed but I suspect nowadays a 2.5 is a 2.5 and a 2.6. is a 2.6 and the whole idea of busting open a Macbook Pro to twiddle is just silly. What are the benchmarks of one vs. the other? Must be miniscule at best.

and any way how many times do you run a processor at 100% unless you are running something liek hand break or have a runaway process
-matt

This is a futile endeavor. There are no jumpers on the logic board that will let you change the FSB or the CPU multiplier to overclock, nor is this possible through EFI. Evidently you have enough sense to know that $250 for an extra .1GHz clock speed bump is not a great value, so I suggest you listen to yourself, as well as your wife, or chances are you'll be sleeping out in the garage for the next few weeks.

In all seriousness.....take that $250 and put it towards something else--upgrade the machine to 4GB of RAM, the larger hard disk, the high res display, or take your wife on vacation. You will never, ever, notice a difference between 2.5 and 2.6Ghz unless you run synthetic benchmarks. And even then, any difference will be miniscule. In fact, there is very little raw speed difference between the new Penryn based MBPs, and the older Merom based models. Any major differences will only be realized if the application is optimized for the SSE4 instructions on the new Penryn chip, and very few applications actually are.

These price premiums are designed for people, well, like yourself, who have in inexplicable need to have the top of the line, even if the return for the cost is minimal. This is the same sort of marketing tactic used to get people to shell out an extra $200 for the black Macbook, which is essentially identical to the mid-range white Macbook in pretty much all respects.

And no, an extra 100Mhz speed bump is utterly NOT worth voiding the warranty. even if OCing the CPU were practical.

Very often actually. Not that your question is relevant to what I said. You can do more than one thing at a time and use most of available CPU cycles.

well i was looking at a different measurement when i was trying to figure that out. but while the Ghz will go up to the max rarely do the processors run at 100%, at least for me, and i keep 7 apps open normally and keep a lot of windows up, even if i run photo shop i dont get the cpus hitting 100% for more than a second i they even hit it
-matt

I don't think these models have jumpers on the Mobo that you change, I believe clock speed is determined by the actual CPU itself. I did the whole jumper multiplier overclock on my G4 FW800. For the boost, not worth the hassle, BUT, these macbooks (pro) might have a the cpu replaceable, but then again, the cpu might be soldered on so then it would definitely not be worth messing with it, unless you just had the money to waste, which I'm assuming you don't since we're having this discussion in the first place =).

Joe Mac

P.S.: just did a google search and confirmed that the processor is indeed soldered on.

The T9 * are all the same, 2.5 and 2.6 are EXACTLY the same except one is clocked 100Mhz higher.
Here's how it works:

Intel will test the chips at a given speed. Let's say 2.6Ghz for the mobile chips. They stress test them and if any of them don't make it through the tests, they "bin" it as a 2.5 or 2.4Ghz model to be on the safe side. The only difference between them is the clockspeed. This is not true for the 2.4Ghz MBP though because it uses a 2.4Ghz T8300 (I think?) with only 3MB of L2 cache instead of 6.

In theory it should be **** easy to overclock the CPU 100Mhz, especially given the 45nm process makes quite cool running processors. However this i usually done in the bios and macs don't have a BIOS, they use EFI. So I'm not sure how it would work but it's definitely possible. It won't be a hardware mod, it will be software (in the software that runs the motherboard).

Is that little performance improvement really worth the trouble and risk of over-clocking the stock chip?

Hi KevLeviathan,

Excellent description on the process of "speed binning." There is another potential issue with overclocking, the CPU multiplier. Intel locks the maximum value for the multiplier, which prevents you from simply running the processor faster. You are forced to overclock the front side bus, which currently runs at 800 MHz (200 MHz quad pumped) in the MacBook Pro. This is an issue, as it causes other components to run out of spec, thus increasing the chance of system instability. This is why companies like Asus and MSI can charge "big bucks" for motherboards with a BIOS that allows fine-tuning of the FSB (as well as voltage adjustments). Good luck!

Good to see another PC convert even though bringing along a bad case of overclock-itis syndrome =)

true, but that is not always how binning works.

in many cases, the quality of the chips are better than expected/needed amount.
then, the chip companies like intel puts 2.5GHz worth chips into 2.4GHz bin as well because
often the demand for 2.4GHz is higher than that of 2.5GHz.

this is why many people can actually succeed in the overclocking adventure.
it is always luck 🙂

unfortunately, apple disallows any of hardware overclocking -
possibly apple actually buy the cheapest not-overclockable cpu/gpus to lower their costs for the parts, but who knows and who cares... as long as it works and apple's build quality is already very low :/