Extra Credit Assignment

Overview

You can add up to 10 points to your course average by writing a paper on the topic of "Overclocking." Your paper will be graded on a ten-point scale. However many points you earn, that number will be added to your course average. So even if you "fail miserably," you can add 1-2 points to your average.

Grading Criteria

All of the following criteria will be used to determine your grade for the assignment: In addition, you must cite all the sources of information you used to gather the information you used to write your paper. Your sources may be books, articles, web pages, manuals, or any other published source of information you can find. You will get no credit if you fail to cite all your sources in a form that allows the reader to access them. That means you have to give publication information for each source. Publication information may be:

How to Proceed

If you decide to do this assignment, proceed as follows:
  1. Gather Information
    Read as much as you can. There are a couple of web pages listed below to get you started. Search the web and the library to find additional information. Read it all and think about it.

  2. Make an Outline
    Decide how you are going to organize what you have learned. The idea is to tell people what overclocking is, why it is important, how it is done, what problems might be encountered, etc. Decide whether you are going to write a broad overview of the topic (a survey paper) or delve deeply into a sub-topic that you found particularly interesting. Decide on the structure for your paper. There should be four major sections: an introduction, the main body of the paper, a brief summary, and a list of references.

  3. Write Your Paper
    Once you have the structure set up write the paper. It is very important that you use your own words as you write the paper. Just cutting and pasting from your sources does not contitute "writing a paper!" It's all right to include brief quotes from your sources, provided you make the quotes accurate, make it clear that they are quotes either by putting them inside quotation marks or (for longer ones) indented from the rest of the text, and indicate which source you are quoting by putting the number of the source from your reference list in square brackets at the end of the quote.
    Each abbreviation and technical term you use should be defined the first time you use it in your paper, except for "really obvious" things, like Hz. For example: "The PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus was patented ..."

  4. Print It!
    Be sure the first page has the title of your paper and your name under that, both centered at the top of the page. Number the pages either at the top or bottom of each page.
    Do not produce a web page for this; write the paper using a word processor and give me a printed copy.

Initial References

These are all web sites you can use to start your search for information about overclocking. Note that the last two are CPU vendor sites; look for information on "chipsets" there.