Welcome to another Thursday and another look at a news post from the not too distant past. This time we look back at a real treat, revisiting an interview with one of HWBOT’s foremost overclocking talents - 0.0 from Thailand. 0.0. happens to be a leading proponent of Mobile overclocking. Back in July 2015 we caught up him and put together an interview that remains a very interesting read today:

HWBOT: When did you discovered overclocking and how or why did you start?

0.0: The first CPU I overclocked was a mobile P8400. I had already seen these overclocked by programming the master PLL usually using software called SetFSB, so I knew they could be overclocked. The laptop had plenty of thermal headroom but unfortunately the PLL was not programmable so I ended up having to hardware mod it. P8400 overclocked.

There were the usual criticisms that laptops cannot be overclocked and would burst into flames etc. It’s still working fine today after 7 years and ~17000 hours of use, and the performance boost was welcome. Of course as with any overclocking one needs to be sensible about it and work within the parameters of the hardware. Besides hardware, firmware can have a lot to do with the devices’ capabilities.

I started delving into firmware during the early days of the laptop mentioned above after a standard manufacturer’s BIOS update went wrong and left the laptop bricked. The manufacturer’s solution through on-line support on a Friday was to have the mainboard replaced at a cost of USD300. Since I wouldn’t be able to send it in until Monday, I tried seeing if there were other alternatives over the weekend. Long story short, there was a crisis recovery option built into the Firmware not mentioned by the manufacturer, and luckily after much trial and error I got it to work, saving time and $300. Since then I have had an interest in firmware.

Catch the full interview with Alex (a.k.a. 0.0) here in the original post from July 17th 2015 in which he goes on talk in more about the technological challenges of pushing locked mobile CPUs. Well worth a read.