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Mac Pro and Xserve overclocking tool

This has been going around the internet for the past couple of days. The German division of ZDNet has released an overclocking tool for Mac Pro and Xserve machines running Leopard.

Overclocking is the process of artificially increasing the clock speed of your processor and memory in order to make it operate at a faster rate. For example, you could make a 2.8 GHz processor operate at 3.0 GHz without the expense of purchasing a faster CPU. This is very popular in the Windows world, particularly with hardcore video gamers, who have managed to push CPUs beyond 4 GHz.

However, increasing the clock rate also increases the power consumption and heat output of the CPU. Upgrading the power supply and increasing the CPU cooling may be necessary - areas that may be tricky with tightly-designed Apple products.

I wouldn't advise doing this on a machine that you depend upon every day but it might be useful for a render farm machine where speed is important and the task will be taken up by another machine if there are any crashes or failures.

Another final thing to note is that your system performance will only be as fast as the slowest link in the chain. If you overclock your CPU but have a really slow hard disk or not very much RAM, the performance increase will be limited.

All in all though, this is a very useful tool for Mac users as long as they are aware of the dangers and potential issues. It could also encourage more video gamers to switch to the Mac.