Dell released the Dimension 3100 in late 2005 and marketed it as a high-end system at a budget price. With its Pentium 4 630 processor, 512MB of RAM and a 160 GB hard drive, the Dimension 3100 performs relatively well with most business and productivity applications. However, the older architecture in the 3 GHz Pentium 4 630, along with low-end integrated graphics and sound, makes the 3100 lag a bit in some high-end 3D games. Nevertheless, the Dimension 3100 does support slight clock speed and voltage increases. By tweaking these values with a third-party application, you can improve the performance of a Dimension 3100 slightly.
Instructions
1. Shut down your Dimension 3100 and restart it. As soon as you see the Dell logo screen, press the "F2" key immediately. The BIOS setup menu screen appears. Enter your BIOS password if prompted.
2. Press the right-arrow key to scroll to the "Performance" menu option and press the "Enter" key. Press the down-arrow key to scroll to the "Hyperthreading" value and press "Enter."
3. Ensure that the "Hyperthreading" value is set to "Enabled." If disabled, press the "+" key to change it to "Enabled." Press the "Esc" key to return to the main menu.
4. Navigate to the ExtremeOverclocking.com website and download the ClockGen application. Save the file to a folder on your computer.
5. Right-click the "Start" button and click "Open Windows Explorer." Browse to the file you downloaded from the ExtremeOverclocking.com website and double-click it. Follow the prompts to install the ClockGen utility on your computer. Restart the 3100 if prompted to do so.
6. Launch ClockGen on your computer. Click the "Options" button. Click the "PLL Setup" button. In the Clock Generator Setup drop-down list, select "ICS 950405" and click "Read Clocks." A new window appears and displays the clock speed settings for your Dimension 3100 computer.
7. Click the top right-arrow button under the clock icons once. Click the lower right-arrow button once. Click the "Apply Selection" button. This increases the clock speed, voltage and bus speed of the memory in the 3100's CPU just slightly.
8. Use the computer as you normally would for a few minutes. If the computer does not crash or freeze, the overclock was successful.
9. Open the ClockGen utility again and attempt to increase the clock speed and voltage in one-click increments. Test the computer to ensure that each overclock attempt is successful.
10. Click "Options" and enable the "Apply Current Settings at Startup" after you finish overclocking your Dimension 3100. The ClockGen applies the overclocking settings each time you start your Dimension 3100 computer.
Tags: Dimension 3100, your Dimension 3100, clock speed, your Dimension, clock speed voltage, speed voltage