What Might Be Used to Increase the Speed of an Existing CPU?

by Jacob Andrew, studioD

Central processing units, or CPUs, are not the only factor within your PC that determines speed. Speed comes down to how quickly your computer, and its programs, responds to your input. When it feels like you have hit a wall in computer response, there are steps you can take to both increase the speed of your CPU and your PC overall.

Overclock the CPU

The most obvious step toward increasing the speed of the CPU is to increase the core voltage clock. The clock is what regulates the amount of energy moving through the CPU and, by increasing this value in the BIOS, you increase the number of bits processed by the CPU in a single second. Unfortunately, CPU overclocking is often not supported by the manufacturer, and for good reason. You can damage the computer without adequate cooling. If your BIOS settings support overclocking, then doing so may be a good way to get a few more megahertz out of the existing CPU. It should be done, however, with caution.

Upgrade to SSD

When a CPU processes a program, that program must first be called up from the hard drive. Hard drives represent one of the biggest speed bottlenecks in computing today. This is because traditional hard drives function by spinning a series of magnetic platters and controlling an arm to read and write data to those platters. Reading and writing speeds are hitting the point where the platters cannot reliably spin fast enough to keep up with the rest of the computer. Solid-state drives, or SSDs, utilize the no-moving-parts technology found in USB flash drives. Replacing your operating system hard drive with an SSD will often unlock the combined power of your memory and CPU.

Expand Your Memory

After the CPU has called the program from the hard drive, it will use random access memory, or RAM, for quick access to the tools the program needs. This includes common functions as well as cached copies of file upon which you are working. While working with multiple Windows or browser tabs, running out of this memory results in the CPU writing this information back to the hard drive in the form of cache. Having an adequate amount of memory will ensure that the CPU can always call from the faster RAM-based information, instead of the slower hard drive cache.

Upgrade Your Memory

When the CPU accesses the RAM, it does so through a front side bus, or FSB. The FSB is like a highway of information, and each motherboard has an FSB rated at a certain speed, measured in megahertz. Memory is also rated in megahertz according to how much of the FSB it can utilize. To cut down on costs while still inflating listed specifications, computer manufacturers make large amounts of memory rated at a lower speed than the FSB of the motherboard. Purchasing memory that matches the FSB speed of your motherboard enables the CPU to read from and write to the memory at its maximum potential.

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