20MHZ Crystal instead of 16MHz oscillator

I am putting together a stand alone arduino and am curious of the effect a 20MHz crystal would have instead of the 16MHz crystal/oscillator. Would this be possible without serious side effects in the operation of the 168?

Thanks in advance

Jim

Electrically no problem - the full speed raw AtMega168's are rated for operation up to and including 20MHz. There are some low-power versions which are only rated to 10MHz.

The only problem would with the Arduino environment - you'd have to do some configuration editing to change the stuff that is assuming 16MHz. The 16Mhz value was chosen because that was the maximum rated speed of the AtMega8 chips which were used int he first arduinos.

Is the extra 4Mhz that important?

Here are some other topics dealing with the same question...

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1192142344

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1172599321