Chris Kohler over at Wired reported today that Sony has allowed developers to overclock the PSP to run at 333mhz, instead of the current 222mhz. In addition, the people over at 1up put a video together illustrating the extent of the changes being made.

Using next year’s God of War: Chains of Olympus the graphical overhaul can be easily seen. What’s unclear is just how portable, or rather un-portable, this overclocking will make the PSP.

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An enhanced CPU on board will do nothing to help Sony fans that are already attached at the hip to their power cord. In addition, there is no mention of heat dispersal. If you increase the amount of processing a CPU has to do, you also increase the amount of ambient energy expended around the core.

PC gamers are no strangers to overclocking, and any one of them can tell you if you speed up the core, you better have a damn good heatsync or your motherboard will fry. This calls into question the PSP’s future platform stability, in addition to general comfort of holding a hotter console. I think Chris Kohler hit the nail on the head when he said, “But now, with PSP being eviscerated by the DS, they need to do whatever they can to make it appealing.”

This move may make the PSP more appealing in the short term. However, with an increase in ambient heat and an even skimpier battery life, Sony needs to think long and hard before making this a staple for PSP development moving forward.

UPDATE: After contacting Sony PR with regards to Syphon Filter and other games running at 333mhz, we can comfirm that God of War is not the first to use this clock rate. A list is being compiled for us pertaining to which games have run 333, but in the mean time I would like to thank Tom Simpson for pointing out this flaw in my piece. While not actually saying that God of War was the first title to use 333mhz I feel like it was implied in my article. Sorry for any confusion, and thanks for visiting Ripten.

Via Wired, and GameVideos

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