RAM Overclocking

While the benefits of RAM overclocking are fairly minimal, it can sometimes win you an extra frame or two in game or unclog a bottleneck that's causing occasional system chug. It's vital to know the official speeds for your RAM before you tinker - if you don't know already, use free app CPU-Z (cupid.com). And now to the BIOS; you're looking for an option to alter the DRAM clock or memory frequency, or whatever random nomenclature your motherboard manufacturer has settled on.

Try and push it up a notch, eg. 400MHz to 410MHz. Bear in mind that DDR/DDR2 effectively doubles its clockspeed, so your BIOS may report it as, say, 800MHz rather than 400. The overclock may fail. In which case, you've several options. You could drop the memory's clockspeed and raise the FSB instead. Or you could increase the voltage the RAM draws. Look for something like 'DRAM voltage' or ‘VDIMM’ and increase it by the tiniest amount at a time.

Just remember that's a real risk of frying your memory and possibly entire system if you go too far. Alternatively, try a latency overclock instead. Look for ‘latency’ or 'GAS' in the BIOS and try decreasing it by 0.5, eg. from 3.0 to 2.5.

For a final, comedy overclock, there's your mouse. Yeah, really. While you can't increase your rodent's sensitivity, you can improve the rate at which it reports its actions to Windows. Grab USB Rate app from tinyurl.com/2cdd88.

There's four speeds listed, but aim for the third, 500MHz. If the mouse, or any other USB devices stop working, you'll need to reset the speed. Use a PS/2 keyboard, tab to the speed slider and use cursor keys to select something lower, then tab again until 'Apply' is selected.