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Recently I was impressed to read a forum mentioning that my old notebook could be significantly upgraded:

I overclock with K10stat (OC app) so I can get it going at 3400-3500Mhz (and no overheating) and things run pretty much smooth in general [...]

This APU has an ATI dedicated video processor with 256mb, but since its a basic GPU inside the chip, I "hacked" my notebook (unlocked the BIOS) and I added a mini-pciexpress (I sacrificed the internal wifi) bridge to PCIe so I could use an external (desktop) GPU, by altering the BIOS to turnoff the integrated video (The original BIOS has this setting and AMD-V locked, but the unlocked/hacked BIOS allows to tweak more advanced settings) [...]

I already tested the notebook with 8gb RAM piece (I am using but as single channel, since its only one RAM piece) and with more than 8gb (8gb in one slot and 4gb in the other) and it worked, but I did not keep both since they were from different brands, speed and config....

Source: Acer Community | 2015 Forum Archives

In short:

  • Overclock from 1.4GHz (Stock) to 3.4GHz
  • Install an external GPU via MiniPCI Express
  • Max RAM from 8Gb (2x4Gb) to 16Gb (2x8Gb)

To begin, I tried to overclock it, as the forum says, with K10Stat but, so far, did not worked.
I was able to underclock it anywhere from 1400MHz to 200MHz and indeed measure the performance decrease with some benchmark tools. However, if K10Stat is set anywhere above 1400MHz, there is no measurable performance difference.

Question

  • The upgrade described in the forum indeed can be achieved or is it just a hoax?
  • Why can't I overclock this system?
  • Is there something locked? Mobo? CPU? OS?
  • If so, is it possible to unlock it?

Hardware Specification

Jeron Baffom
  • 131

0 Answers0