Many of us enjoy overclocking, but that type of activity is usually reserved for desktop systems with enthusiast-friendly motherboards and perhaps the occasional aftermarket cooler. A sub-$500 netbook therefore seems like the last place you'd expect to find overclocking support. However, as Gizmodo reports, the latest official BIOS update for MSI's Wind U100 netbook includes overclocking functionality.
The folks at Digital Vagabond have all the details, and they say the overclocking settings really do work. In fact, in their testing with 3DMark03, the 24% overclock setting reportedly bumped the system's score from 716 to 929—a 30% boost.
The Wind's Intel Atom processor runs at 1.6GHz by default, so that overclock pushes it up to almost 2GHz. MSI includes 8% and 15% overclocking presets, as well, and you can activate them just by hitting FN+F10 with the laptop hooked up to AC power. If you'd like to try this yourself, Digital Vagabond's article includes a little guide for how to get everything going.
That said, we should point out that we haven't tried these BIOS settings ourselves, and they might cause hardware damage and/or instability. MSI also stresses on the official BIOS download page that it "takes no responsibility for any damage caused by improper use or lack of technical expertise," so this probably isn't covered under the warranty, either.
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