overdrive cpus

[eminem41269]

how dot hey work like do they clip on top of the old chip and sumhow make it faster or is it a diffrent chip altoghether. i always am confused since i never had one.

[freddy]

no it plugs into your CPU socket and gives u "turbo power"

cough cough


PS what do u do with a leaky sunroof in a submerine ?

[Platypus]

It depends on which overdrive. There were some "clipover" units produced to upgrade surface-mount 486SX's (& 386's for that matter), they disabled the underlying CPU. Most overdrives allowed earlier boards to use later technology that otherwise wouldn't have been possible because of different voltage requirements or the like. They plugged into the same socket and were engineered to look to the motherboard like the older chip, in terms of ID, timing requirements etc. The extra performance usually didn't match the cost, which was often similar to a new motherboard & CPU anyway.

Apart from Intel's own overdrive chips, the Kingston TurboChip was a well known third party unit.