ClockGen

The ClockGen utility from CPUID.com has long been used to overclock processors and motherboards. If you have not heard of it, here is what it is :

The ClockGen serie consists in a set of overclocking softwares, based on the Panopsys hardware detection engine. Each of these softwares is dedicated to one or several motherboards. A ClockGen software allow to dynamically overclock several devices of your system : CPU, memory, AGP and PCI bus.

However, its use has so far been limited to only desktop motherboards. In fact, if you check the list of supported hardware, only desktop motherboards are listed. So, how can ClockGen aid our cause?

Well, as luck would have it, our forum member raz informed us that he was apparently able to overclock his Toshiba Satellite M30 notebook using the ClockGen utility!

Curious, we checked out his claims and true enough, ClockGen worked! Here are our findings.

Finding The Right ClockGen

First of all, pay a visit to the ClockGen page. Read the introduction to get an idea of what it does and of course, go through the instructions at the bottom. It is important that you know what you are dealing with here.

You will also notice a long list of supported motherboards. Of course, none of which are notebook motherboards or even use the same chipsets. But each motherboard listed has a particular ClockGen utility linked to it.

They have been named according to the clock generator used in the motherboard. For example - CG-ICS951001. The name tells that it is a ClockGen utility for the ICS 951001 clock generator controller.

Users of supported motherboards only need to download the specific ClockGen utility to overclock their motherboards. Other ClockGen utilities will not work.

Since Intel Centrino motherboards are not officially supported, we had to try each ClockGen utility to find out which works for Centrino motherboards. A good bet would be the ClockGen utilities for Intel-manufactured motherboards.

As you can see, there are only two clock generators supported by ClockGen - the CY28346 and ICS952618 clock generators. The CY28346 clock generator is used for the i845 motherboards while the ICS952618 is used for the i865 and i875 motherboards.

We tried both ClockGen utilities with the Toshiba Satellite M30 and amazingly, one of them worked! Let's take a look!