Can I overclock my MacBook pro?

[Nathaniel Pysklo]

I have a 2011 17" Macbook pro
Processor 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024 MB
Would I be able to overclock it? and if I can how?

 

[pushanthegreat]

Nope... Actually, very few notebooks have a BIOS (or EFI) that has overclocking features enabled (that's not to say that you can't find tools out there thay may hack the EFI). The thermal tolerances on notebooks (especially ones packed as densely as MacBooks) are very tight. They tend to run on the hot side under normal loads. With something like video encoding, you're already maxing out the CPUs performance and probably already pushing some high temps. Any overclock that you might be able to achieve if the settings were available would be very minimal as to make little difference. You would likely run into stability issues pretty early on.

Desktop systems tend to have a great deal of open space and much more efficient cooling options which is why they tend to overclock better. But even with that, most serious overclockers would replace their stock fans or go with other cooling options.

 

[aMunster]

Unlikely.

Source: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1280384

 

[Nathaniel Pysklo]

Nope... Actually, very few notebooks have a BIOS (or EFI) that has overclocking features enabled (that's not to say that you can't find tools out there thay may hack the EFI). The thermal tolerances on notebooks (especially ones packed as densely as MacBooks) are very tight. They tend to run on the hot side under normal loads. With something like video encoding, you're already maxing out the CPUs performance and probably already pushing some high temps. Any overclock that you might be able to achieve if the settings were available would be very minimal as to make little difference. You would likely run into stability issues pretty early on.

Desktop systems tend to have a great deal of open space and much more efficient cooling options which is why they tend to overclock better. But even with that, most serious overclockers would replace their stock fans or go with other cooling options.

Thanks so much