Hi all,

Several years ago we were donated my mums old e520 / pentium D machine. This was fine for general internet and for the children to use for their homework.

However, my youngest is now 13 and interested in pc gaming, I saw him playing team fortress 2 and he was enjoying it despite the appalling frame rate, so have set on a course of upgrades, mainly just for the fun of it to see what difference a few budget upgrades would make.

First I upgraded the bios to the latest version and put in a spare Core2duo 1.86 and went to 4gb ram. I then upgraded my own pc and put my old Core2duo 2.66 in and swapped the 128mb 7300 video card for a spare gt610 2Gb.

The most recent step was another cpu upgrade, I spotted a cheap, poorly described Qx6800 2.93. This is working fine and recognised in the bios and in windows, and while increased the benchmark scores wasn't the jump I was expecting.

Doing some reading around other e520 posts on this board I have read of people using throttlestop to increase the multiplier.

For some reason it won't work on mine, I can't do anything other than increase the voltage one step, nothing else will adjust up, it will only let me adjust the multiplier down. Are there different motherboard / chipsets which may be preventing an overclock? I have read of others using 3.5 or even 4ghz on this cpu with improved cooling setups.

novabench cpu scores have gone from 119 to 182 to 241 to 256 and overall score has jumped from 246 to 455, with the whole thing feeling noticeably snappier. 3Dmark06 went from 752 to 4186, Team fortress 2 runs like a dream and looks really nice, my boy is over the moon, and it's been fun experimenting with this old machine and has so far cost me a total of £18.

I would love to put a modern graphics card in which I could transfer to a new system later, but the space restrictions may mean this is as far as I go with it.