Has anyone tried Overclocking a N450 Netbook?

[maniac5999]

Like the title says, I'm wondering if anyone has tried. Generally intel's 45NM process seems pretty comfortable getting reliably to 3ghz with almost no effort or voltage change on desktops, and I was wondering if anyone had tried OCing a netbook. with default 533mhz RAM speed, figure that if you put in 1066 ram, you could get a 100% OC before hitting the ram's limits. A 25% overclock would be about 2ghz--probably pretty snappy, and a 50% OC would be around 2.5ghz--definately a real nice speed, and if the GMA3150 gets about 50% faster, you might even be able to play some games.

For $300 it seems like it would be a decent gamble to take. Has anyone done it sucessfully? has anyone bricked a netbook? Feel free to share your experiences good or bad.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I don't have a N450 netbook, but I do have an HP Mini 311 with a N270 processor + ION chipset. Using third party bios found on the internet I have my 311 overclocked to 2.3 GHZ, with 1200 MHZ RAM. This overclock is stable enough for 24 hours of Prime 95 and makes browsing on the netbook much more tolerable.

It helps with games a good bit (CS:Source went from unplayable to enjoyable at native res), but most are still CPU bound. It seems a Atom at 2.3 GHZ is about equal to a 1.7-8 GHZ Pentium M, and is probably not quite as fast (but very close) to one of those CULV processors running at 1.4 GHZ or so. My geekbench score is right above the netbooks with the dual core atoms, and right below the CULV single core netbooks for a reference. Overall it is probably only a 30% performance boost but it feels like much more. The overclock only took 15-20 mins off my battery life.

The reason I think it works so well on the 311 is that the cooling is over designed compared to other netbook because of the ION chipset's heat- it DEFINITELY has a mighter fan than my Acer netbook does. But even still many on the myhpmini forum have bricked their netbooks trying to fly too high (anything above 2.4 GHZ is VERY risky), so for every success story like mine there is a story of a bricked 311 somewhere.

Hope my input helps! I plan to add a SSD to mine soon so that it will feel more like a real laptop with regular use.