doofus125 said:
Also, does anyone know if I put the 450mhz processor in and if it still reads as 300mhz will it only perform at 300? Or will it just cause problems to leave it in like it is?
I'm reading your questions two different ways, so I'll answer them both ways.
1.)
Short answer:
Running a 450MHZ chip at 300MHZ will not cause any problems other than the system running slower than it should.
More involved answer:
The clock tells the chip when to perform it's actions. The clocks speeds are set, with leeway, so that it has enough time to ensure that it can complete the actions.
A very, very basic example: lets say that it takes 1 nano-second to read 2 numbers from a register, 3 ns to perform some simple mathmatical calculation on those numbers, and 1ns to put the result back in a register. to save time, these steps are not performed in a single cycle, but rather happen in stages called a pipeline. So the clock cycle needs to be at least 3ns long (this clock speed is transferred over into Hertz, which is just how many clock cycles per second there are). This ensures that the read, write, and calculation can be performed. If the clock cycle is any shorter than 3ns, there will not be enough time to perform the calculation, so you end up storing the wrong value. If the clock cycle is any longer, you end up finishing well before you can perform the next action, so you have wasted time. This is what you are doing by running a 450MHZ chip at 300MHZ.
Note: Of course, things are much more complicated than I illustrated above. CPUs are given a good amount of leeway and can be "overclocked" (decreasing the length of a clock cycle) by a decent margin without making things happen too fast. There are also safeguards built in to the chip to make sure that things happen correctly, if the clock cycle is too fast, it will adjust itself by letting several cycles go until the proper action is performed, this results in a maximum performance and over clocking too much can in fact cause a decrease in performance. I'll leave the rest of my overclocking rant for another day.
2.)
Well the processor you have is kinda old. So you're going to be have to get an older motherboard. AFAIK, on older motherboards, you need to set the clock speed yourself, whether it be by adjusting jumpers/switches or by doing it in the bios. More modern motherboards will automatically set the clock to the chip, in a good amount of the mid to lower-end boards, you're stuck with the MOBOs automatic setting unless you upgrade bios or something.
I just got home from work and I am to tired to stay up, lol.
