Overclocking the car? Am I insane? Well, some people think I am, but that’s not the point

If you’re one of those that assemble their own computers – either because you’re control freak like me, or because you want to get the best features for your money – you know that often the best price/performance ratio is achieved through overclocking.

Usually this means raising the speed of the FSB and letting the CPU follow. This doesn’t work just like that – you need to raise the voltage to the CPU, often to memory too and sometimes even to the bus itself.

If you don’t raise the voltage all kinds of weird effects crashes will ensue. In my case, my mistake was that I did not stress test my new machine after overclocking. On top of that, I added another 2 sticks of 1GB memory modules and for some reason this wouldn’t work without raising the voltage even though the memory wasn’t overclocked.

After raising the voltage, everything worked (and still works) just fine.

And this has to do with the car how? Turns out my car’s (Peugeot 206, nice equipment but nothing too fancy) board computer was showing symptoms of craziness. It wouldn’t crash like a regular computer would, but on a cold start, it would report various (different) problems each time. If I restarted once or twice, everything was fine.

I should have noticed that this started approximately at the same time the car had slight difficulties to start when cold.

The problem was banal – the battery did not provide enough voltage to the car, including the board computer. When the battery was replaced everything was back to normal. Damn, today even the car needs to get enough voltage to work properly.