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Overclock your Mac Pro from 2.8GHz to 3.24GHz with easy tool

In the PC world, it isn't too tough to get overclocking tools. They have existed for years and can, with cooling apparatus and other neat tricks, double the speed of a typical Intel CPU.

The Macintosh world and Apple's EFI BIOS replacement make overclocking more difficult - well at least less often attempted. A few products have popped up over the last few years, but they have been very limited.

Earlier today, ZDNet.de released a tool that looks very promising in this regard. According to their website, the tool can currently overclock Mac Pros and XServes with Intel Xeon processors. They use the example of taking a base model Mac Pro running at 2.8 GHz and getting it to run faster than Apple's top of the line 3.2 GHz machines.

This tool not only increases the processor speed, but it also speeds up the memory and bus speed as well. Thankfully, Mac Pros and Xserves have error correcting RAM which should help with reliability at these higher speeds. 

Since this is a software overclocking tool, it doesn't pose too much of a risk, but as always in this arena, proceed with caution and I am not responsible for imploding machines. Bugs in clock time have been reported but fixes are coming. To go back to your old clock speed, you'll just need to reboot.

If you are looking to upgrade your base model Mac Pro into a top of the line model and don't mind the inherent risk, perhaps you should give it a try. I don't have any machines that fit into the Xeon category that I can test this with but let us know your results.

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What People Are Saying

Great ... but how about ...

... tooling this up for the 13" MacBook? If I had the knowhow, I'd do it myself.

Gary

if you want to overclock,

if you want to overclock, you need a desktop. overclocking a 13" macbook is just asking for a big crash

Not so fast...???

Well, minor improvement... but there seems to be a sideeffect... the clock keeps wrong time... out of sync ..... or am I the only one??? MacPro 2GHz 12GB RAM, running on OS X 10.5.4 (or it's the issue with 10.5.4?) I will revert to 10.5.3 this week to see if it is 10.5.4 or not.

Tried/success

It works, although I can't say I see much improvement. Not enough to risk my machine with, I am going to remove it.

It is nice that it is a software tool - perhaps if I cam getting crazy into Maya I'll ratchet it up a bit.