Slashdot Mirror

http://people.netscape.com/toms/c ubicl e/computer/
'http://www.hard ocp.com/news_images/2000/january_2000/1-15-00b.htm l
etc. I think the idea of a lego case has been dead-horsed around here before too, but I am too lazy this Sunday to look it up.

A few weeks before the GeForce2 GTS launch, nVidia was good enough to fly me out to their headquarters in Santa Clara and check out their GeForce2 GTS before anyone else had even seen the card.

The staff at nVidia has bent over backwards to ensure that I have been treated fairly and have ensured that I have had information at my disposal to write informative and accurate reviews of their products.

If I ever wrote something that was in error or made their product look bad you can bet that nVidia would do everything in their power to protect their intellectual property.

I really can't fathom why Taco said anything about admitting wrongdoing... this non-apology is yet another reason I won't be purchasing anything from nVidia ever again. I highly encourage anyone who hasn't already to let info@nvidia.com know that you'll be doing the same. Ask them for their side of the story; you'll receive enough bullshit to snow ten strong men.

The correct spellings are as follows:

• NVIDIA
• RIVA
• TNT
• GTS
• GeForce
• Quadro

MR. GARBUS: Mr. Schumann, is it or is it not true that while at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, last week, you stole a Taiwanese boy's pants and used them for your own private use? Did you know you were in fact commiting a crime against major movie studios, and that the MPAA are very concerned about this?

MR. SCHUMANN: No, I was not aware.

Single drive speed can range from anywhere between 20-31Mb/s (b or B? I can't remember). The truth of the matter is, most people do not exceed their IDE controller's maximum bandwidth. An ATA-66 or ATA-100 controller allows bursts of up to those speeds, because data is temporarily stored in the hard drive or controller cache during that short burst period. In practice however, most people see speeds in the 20's range due to random seeking/reading/writing.

ATA-66 made a big difference for me in drive speed for my squid proxy server, where bursts happen frequently. Drive speed is well below the ATA-66 maximum bandwidth, but my IDE bus has sufficient room for regular bursts which help in speed.

When ATA-66 was first released, Thresh's Firing Squad put up some benchmarks comparing ATA-33 to ATA-66, showing considerable speed improvements in ATA-66. These were synthetic tests showing best case scenarios.... but in practice most people on desktops will not notice much of a difference. In a more recent review of the Abit KA7-100 I believe on HardOCP, the reviewer spoke highly of the potential of the ATA-100 on the KA7-100 motherboard, when he was not too impressed by ATA-66.

Break out the Alpha coolers and overclock this to kingdom come.

There's a post at Kyles HardOCP regarding the 'demise' of the Athlon, due to the fact that they're coming out with the socket A processor. What's the general consensus?

I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'

No. The K6's successer is allready on hte market. The K7's isn't. What's selling now is allways worse then what's selling in two months (in CPUs at least). Just because there is an extra large discontunity coming up doesn't mean you can point to the future product and say the current one is history.

That was bad wording on my part, I apolgize. I should have said, maybe: Marketwise , the K7 is obsolete. As in, it's time for them to market the poo out of the Spitfires and Thunderbirds. In the sense I wrote it there, I didn't mean obsolete, pertaining to old hardware (Like writing this post on my Atari 800 (Not literally)). Very bad choice of words on my part. Also, if you are interetested, check out this link to HardOCP, where they have some benchmarks of a 750mhz Thunderbird.

As many quality hardware sites speculate, the Spitfire will still outperform the current Athlon in many applications, mostly games. Unfortantly, a good site I frequent (Ace's hardware) had an article/link/write up on why the Spitfire and T-bird CPUs are better CPUs then current Athlons (As in, what they changed, how the on-die cache will help/hurt, etc) but they don't keep a backlog of articles that I can see. If you want to check them out and see if you can find anything, the address is www.aceshardware.com . They have pretty technical info, which makes the place pretty good.. =]

so what do these "overclockers" do with their machines after they're done voiding their warranties?

"Games like 'Doom' are popular."

Ok...
I wonder exactly how many FPS you can get with a dual ClereonII 633 oc'd to 1ghz (see this article).

They're trying to do this already, you might say.

Think about it: the original Pentiums, P2's, and their AMD counterparts were neither bus or multiplier-locked. You could clock them to whatever they would take if you didn't mind fiddling with the jumpers for an afternoon.

Then Intel decided it didn't like us getting more than we paid for so easily. Entrez-vouz the P3 and multiplier locking. Yes, you can jack with the FSB, but you're screwed to the wall with that 4. 4.5, 5, or whatever clock-lock Intel built in unless you lucked into getting an "engineering" sample that didn't have this "feature."

The Athlon can be twiddled in both directions by means of a GFD/GFA, but that's one more item to include, and there's no guarantee that they'll remain so friendly to hobbyists and the like. *sigh*

As for the pride/perception the manufacturer has for their OC'd product, it might be a combination of shame and greed - we know they downgrade some chips, and when we get their full potential back out of them, we've essentially bilked them of a couple hundred dollars' profit that they'd have made if we'd bought the "officially" faster chip.

"Binning" is a necessary evil for Intel & AMD - not everyone wants to pony up for an 850MHz chip, and by detuning it to 600, they'll reach more customers. They have learned to accept, grudgingly, that some of us will get those back up where they belong before even booting that processor the first time out of the box.

As evidence, I point you to Kyle @ HardOCP who got a Cel-II 633 to run at 1011MHz yesterday. The lucky bastage. ;-)

Rafe

V^^^^V

I'm having trouble seeing how this qualifies as 'news', as these chipshave been announced, and tested, for weeks now. This is at _least_ the fourth such article on the web, and not exactly one of the most technically well done. Read here for a much better job imho.

Even if we are to ignore the issue of this post being 'newsworthy', The reviews' implication that a P3 650 performs on par with the ~900Mhz Celermine is laughable. The reviewers decided (for whatever reason) to limit the 3d benchmarks with an old (many would say obsolete) video card. The bottleneck is clearly not the CPU at this point, an assertion backed by many of the other reviews of these chips. There is just no technical reason to support the odd results they got, nor were any attempts made to explain them.

Come on people, let's at least try to analyze what we read on the web before we submit it to /. Geez, maybe I oughta start submitting the local bowling league results.....

FriendTech Socket370 to FCPGA converter

This card allows you to put Coppermine processors on normal Socket 370 boards, which normally don't support FCPGA processors. For more info on overclocking and these cards (in the future), I suggest HardOCP and Overclockers.

Hardocp has been talking about overclocking a couple of Celeron II 633s to 1 ghz stable with only an alpha cooler. They should have the benchmarks within the next few days, so we'll see how they perform.

while the new celerons are nice chips, they definitely fall far behind the coppermines at comperable speeds, for a detailed celeron vs coppermine article check this one at hardocp

• The Tech Report
• Ars Technica
• AnandTech
• HardOCP

The other sites are www.cnet.com and www.sysopt.com if you wondered. :)

Some more corrections/thoughts that seem to have gotten missed in this discussion so far:

1) It's not necessarily an AMD chip

Many of you seem to be under the impression that the X-Box will be using an Athlon variant (presumably a Spitfire), but the name of the CPU vendor was conspiciously left out of today's announcement. Indeed, according to this article at C|Net, MS has decided to go with Intel for the CPU instead of AMD as earlier rumored.

If I had to guess, I'd say this means a 600 MHz Coppermine modified to support Willamette's new SSE2 instructions, which look quite impressive. (Although the most impressive things I've read about them (see this article at Ace's) are in regards to their double-precision SIMD performance, and IIRC games almost always use single-precision floats.)

This makes sense because two of Willamette's other signature features--a 20-stage deep pipeline and a double-pumped ALU--don't make sense here; games don't need much in the way of integer performance, and the deep pipeline is only good for increasing clock speed (indeed, clockspeed being equal, it slows things down)--and is definitely not necessary to reach 600 MHz.

On the other hand, Willamette's "400 MHz" (really quad-pumped 100 MHz) bus might not be such a bad idea for a next-gen console. Indeed, it might be just the thing to keep the NV15 based graphics chip full of data. The problem, of course, is cost, cost, cost. Which leads me to my next point:

2) 600MHz isn't such a bad decision

Yeah, I know that by the time this thing comes out, new PC's will be sporting 2 GHz Willamettes and 1.8 GHz Athlons. However, there's one problem with all y'all going around saying that that means that the X-Box should have a much faster chip too; those 2 GHz chips are going to be selling for something like $800-$1000 a piece.

And then there's the problem of how chips are normally clocked versus how they need to be clocked for a fixed-spec market like a console. You see, when Intel (or AMD, or whoever) makes a chip, they don't stick a clock multiplier on it until it's done. They make the chip, then test it to see how fast it can reliably run (this depends on lots of factors, among them the quality of the particular piece of silicon; there's no way to definitively know this number without actually testing it), and then stick on a multiplier such that it runs at that speed (actually a speed bin or two lower, just to be safe). This means that some (very very very small) percentage of P3's ends up being smacked with a 10x multiplier and being sold as a 1GHz chip; some get an 8x multiplier and are sold at 800MHz; and some--but just a few--can't manage to run reliably at even 600 MHz (or whatever the lowest speed P3's are sold at these days is), and are tossed in the trash).

Now the thing is, all of this probability stuff is built into the price. You see, it costs Intel exactly the same--around $70, IIRC--to make that one chip that ends up being branded at 1 GHz as it does to make the one that gets sold at 600 MHz. The difference is, it takes a whole lot of chips before they make one that's good enough to run at 1 Ghz. And a bunch of them are lost to the trash bin along the way. That's why they charge different amounts for the faster chip--to make up for the fact that they're harder (but *not* more expensive) to make. And that's (partially) why even the cheapest P3's still cost about $200--far more than the cost to fab each particular one.

In the console market, though, that little trick just doesn't work. When you're fabbing CPU's for the X-Box, either it runs at 600MHz, or you throw it away. Furthermore, since the entire thing is only going to cost $300, the CPU better not cost more than, say, $35 or $40; after all, that $300 has to include 64 MB of (possibly Rambus??) RAM, the graphics chip you're buying from NVidia, which itself will have probably 32 MB and possible 64 MB of RAM (possibly DDR RAM); an 8 GB hard drive, a DVD drive, a motherboard, a stylish case, a controller, possibly a keyboard, probably pretty impressive sound support, and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting. Point being, you want to make sure you can make these chips run at 600 MHz with *very high yields* in comparison to the yields that Intel and AMD normally achieve.

Furthermore, with a kickass graphics chip (and especially one that has hardware T&L like the GeForce does and the NV15 will) the speed of the CPU is much less important. Indeed, as Kyle over at HardOCP showed (check here and here), with today's fastest chips, in real-world conditions it is sometimes faster to run with a GeForce's Hardware T&L turned *off* (i.e. so the CPU calculates T&L) than with it on! On the other hand, that same GeForce, when paired with a mediocre CPU, speeds things up tremendously. Of course, the T&L in the NV15 will be considerably improved, such that it will no doubt be a great help when paired with that 600 MHz chip. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's a waste when paired with those 2 GHz Willamettes everyone wants in the X-Box instead.

3) The X-Box will perform identically to a 600 MHz / 64 MB RAM PC of today--i.e. worse than a PS2

Absolutely definitely maybe not.

First the absolutely not: the real guts of the X-Box is not its 600 MHz CPU, but rather its NVidia based graphics chip. Even today, a pretty slow Celeron with a kickass graphics card--i.e. a DDR GeForce--will be pretty competitive with the latest Ghz P3 with a very respectible graphics card, say a Matrox G400, when it comes to running games. Indeed, in many situations (i.e. at high resolutions), it will run just as fast as that Ghz P3 with the same kickass GeForce--and much faster than the P3 with the Matrox--because at high resolutions (i.e. 1280 and 1600), the limiting factor is always the fill-rate of the video card. Course, this doesn't help if you're running at TV resolution, but you get my point: for games, the video card is *more* important than the CPU--and the GPU in the X-Box will be much better than any graphics card on the market today.

Next, the definitely: the X-Box, like all consoles, will only come in one spec. That means game developers can program their games knowing exactly what they'll be running on--and taking full advantage of that as much as possible. This means, amongst other things, that they won't have to design their games to look adequate across a wide range of resolutions and graphical detail levels, but can instead concentrate on making it look good and run fast at the one graphical level it will be run on. Secondly, this means that, like on any other console, developers will be able to dip below the API level and reap the speed benefits that come from being able to program a much lower levels, including hand-tuning important graphical code at the register-level in the GPU. This can only be done when you know that the specs of the machines that will run your game are all identical.

Now for the maybe: one of the major "points" of the X-Box is that it will be nearly compatible with normal PCs, which of course come in all shapes and flavors. The difficulty here is that, in order to maintain this compatibility, developers would need to stay at the API level, and would need to design their games from a hardware-agnostic point of view, which would remove most of the benefits of uniformity I just mentioned. However, I'd guess that what will most likely happen is that developers will keep most of their code at the D3D level, but still optimize the most important routines for the X-Box's GPU. The end result will be that X-Box games *will not* run on PC's (although PC games might run on X-Box??), but that it will still be considerably easier to port PC games to X-Box than to any other console. On the other hand, it's reportedly very easy to port PC games to the PS2, so maybe this advantage isn't as great as MS banked on. In any case, it's important to note that it's this same loss of the benefits of uniformity which has lead to almost no Dreamcast games making use of the Dreamcast's ability to run WinCE and hence pseudo-D3D. Indeed, I believe that MS has officially withdrawn their WinCE support of Dreamcast due to a complete and total lack of interest from Dreamcast developers.

4) It's Windows, and it's a PC, so it will be confusing, take forever to boot, and crash like crazy

This is almost certainly wrong. For one thing, the X-Box will be running a version of what up to now has been called Embedded NT--which should be extremely stipped down and quite reliable, as well as offering very short boot times. (Reportedly the PS2's boot time is quite long for a console--on the order of 5 seconds or so.) Furthermore, probably most Windows crashes come as a result of either bad drivers--which should never happen on a standardized machine like the X-Box--or as a result of problems with memory management of legacy code--again, no problem since there will be none--or with multitasking apps not behaving themselves--which won't be a problem since the X-Box will only run one thing at a time. Furthermore, 64 MB of RAM should be more than adequate, considering the lack of multitasking and the fact that the OS will be much much leaner than normal Windows or NT.

On the other hand, I have to say that the prospect of an 8-gig hard drive scares me a bit, if nothing else than because it offers the possibility of quite a lot more complexity and variations in end-users' actual setups. I doubt MS will allow anything like DLL hell to manifest itself, though; I'm sure the X-Box OS will keep every program's DLLs seperate and well managed, especially since this is a (more like the) feature of MS's upcoming-and-stupidly-named Windows ME.

Phew. So--do I think the X-Box will be phenomenally successful? No, not really, I don't. While I do believe that it will be more powerful that the PS2 on a theoretical level, I don't know if the difference will shine through in the games. Basically, there are two possibilities: most X-Box developers will try to keep their games as trivial ports from their PC counterparts, in which case they won't be able to take advantage of the uniformity of having a single machine to develop for, and thus the PS2 will be more impressive, or X-Box developers will try to "program to the metal", in which case they will be a year behind on the learning curve of low level programming, and thus their games will probably never decisively beat what's coming out for PS2 at the same time.

On the other hand, I think that it just might be successful (depends on if the PS2 actually conquers the world beforehand, as many predict), and I'd give it about equal odds to succeed as, say, Nintendo's Dolphin.

Some more corrections/thoughts that seem to have gotten missed in this discussion so far:

1) It's not necessarily an AMD chip

Many of you seem to be under the impression that the X-Box will be using an Athlon variant (presumably a Spitfire), but the name of the CPU vendor was conspiciously left out of today's announcement. Indeed, according to this article at C|Net, MS has decided to go with Intel for the CPU instead of AMD as earlier rumored.

If I had to guess, I'd say this means a 600 MHz Coppermine modified to support Willamette's new SSE2 instructions, which look quite impressive. (Although the most impressive things I've read about them (see this article at Ace's) are in regards to their double-precision SIMD performance, and IIRC games almost always use single-precision floats.)

This makes sense because two of Willamette's other signature features--a 20-stage deep pipeline and a double-pumped ALU--don't make sense here; games don't need much in the way of integer performance, and the deep pipeline is only good for increasing clock speed (indeed, clockspeed being equal, it slows things down)--and is definitely not necessary to reach 600 MHz.

On the other hand, Willamette's "400 MHz" (really quad-pumped 100 MHz) bus might not be such a bad idea for a next-gen console. Indeed, it might be just the thing to keep the NV15 based graphics chip full of data. The problem, of course, is cost, cost, cost. Which leads me to my next point:

2) 600MHz isn't such a bad decision

Yeah, I know that by the time this thing comes out, new PC's will be sporting 2 GHz Willamettes and 1.8 GHz Athlons. However, there's one problem with all y'all going around saying that that means that the X-Box should have a much faster chip too; those 2 GHz chips are going to be selling for something like $800-$1000 a piece.

And then there's the problem of how chips are normally clocked versus how they need to be clocked for a fixed-spec market like a console. You see, when Intel (or AMD, or whoever) makes a chip, they don't stick a clock multiplier on it until it's done. They make the chip, then test it to see how fast it can reliably run (this depends on lots of factors, among them the quality of the particular piece of silicon; there's no way to definitively know this number without actually testing it), and then stick on a multiplier such that it runs at that speed (actually a speed bin or two lower, just to be safe). This means that some (very very very small) percentage of P3's ends up being smacked with a 10x multiplier and being sold as a 1GHz chip; some get an 8x multiplier and are sold at 800MHz; and some--but just a few--can't manage to run reliably at even 600 MHz (or whatever the lowest speed P3's are sold at these days is), and are tossed in the trash).

Now the thing is, all of this probability stuff is built into the price. You see, it costs Intel exactly the same--around $70, IIRC--to make that one chip that ends up being branded at 1 GHz as it does to make the one that gets sold at 600 MHz. The difference is, it takes a whole lot of chips before they make one that's good enough to run at 1 Ghz. And a bunch of them are lost to the trash bin along the way. That's why they charge different amounts for the faster chip--to make up for the fact that they're harder (but *not* more expensive) to make. And that's (partially) why even the cheapest P3's still cost about $200--far more than the cost to fab each particular one.

In the console market, though, that little trick just doesn't work. When you're fabbing CPU's for the X-Box, either it runs at 600MHz, or you throw it away. Furthermore, since the entire thing is only going to cost $300, the CPU better not cost more than, say, $35 or $40; after all, that $300 has to include 64 MB of (possibly Rambus??) RAM, the graphics chip you're buying from NVidia, which itself will have probably 32 MB and possible 64 MB of RAM (possibly DDR RAM); an 8 GB hard drive, a DVD drive, a motherboard, a stylish case, a controller, possibly a keyboard, probably pretty impressive sound support, and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting. Point being, you want to make sure you can make these chips run at 600 MHz with *very high yields* in comparison to the yields that Intel and AMD normally achieve.

Furthermore, with a kickass graphics chip (and especially one that has hardware T&L like the GeForce does and the NV15 will) the speed of the CPU is much less important. Indeed, as Kyle over at HardOCP showed (check here and here), with today's fastest chips, in real-world conditions it is sometimes faster to run with a GeForce's Hardware T&L turned *off* (i.e. so the CPU calculates T&L) than with it on! On the other hand, that same GeForce, when paired with a mediocre CPU, speeds things up tremendously. Of course, the T&L in the NV15 will be considerably improved, such that it will no doubt be a great help when paired with that 600 MHz chip. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's a waste when paired with those 2 GHz Willamettes everyone wants in the X-Box instead.

3) The X-Box will perform identically to a 600 MHz / 64 MB RAM PC of today--i.e. worse than a PS2

Absolutely definitely maybe not.

First the absolutely not: the real guts of the X-Box is not its 600 MHz CPU, but rather its NVidia based graphics chip. Even today, a pretty slow Celeron with a kickass graphics card--i.e. a DDR GeForce--will be pretty competitive with the latest Ghz P3 with a very respectible graphics card, say a Matrox G400, when it comes to running games. Indeed, in many situations (i.e. at high resolutions), it will run just as fast as that Ghz P3 with the same kickass GeForce--and much faster than the P3 with the Matrox--because at high resolutions (i.e. 1280 and 1600), the limiting factor is always the fill-rate of the video card. Course, this doesn't help if you're running at TV resolution, but you get my point: for games, the video card is *more* important than the CPU--and the GPU in the X-Box will be much better than any graphics card on the market today.

Next, the definitely: the X-Box, like all consoles, will only come in one spec. That means game developers can program their games knowing exactly what they'll be running on--and taking full advantage of that as much as possible. This means, amongst other things, that they won't have to design their games to look adequate across a wide range of resolutions and graphical detail levels, but can instead concentrate on making it look good and run fast at the one graphical level it will be run on. Secondly, this means that, like on any other console, developers will be able to dip below the API level and reap the speed benefits that come from being able to program a much lower levels, including hand-tuning important graphical code at the register-level in the GPU. This can only be done when you know that the specs of the machines that will run your game are all identical.

Now for the maybe: one of the major "points" of the X-Box is that it will be nearly compatible with normal PCs, which of course come in all shapes and flavors. The difficulty here is that, in order to maintain this compatibility, developers would need to stay at the API level, and would need to design their games from a hardware-agnostic point of view, which would remove most of the benefits of uniformity I just mentioned. However, I'd guess that what will most likely happen is that developers will keep most of their code at the D3D level, but still optimize the most important routines for the X-Box's GPU. The end result will be that X-Box games *will not* run on PC's (although PC games might run on X-Box??), but that it will still be considerably easier to port PC games to X-Box than to any other console. On the other hand, it's reportedly very easy to port PC games to the PS2, so maybe this advantage isn't as great as MS banked on. In any case, it's important to note that it's this same loss of the benefits of uniformity which has lead to almost no Dreamcast games making use of the Dreamcast's ability to run WinCE and hence pseudo-D3D. Indeed, I believe that MS has officially withdrawn their WinCE support of Dreamcast due to a complete and total lack of interest from Dreamcast developers.

4) It's Windows, and it's a PC, so it will be confusing, take forever to boot, and crash like crazy

This is almost certainly wrong. For one thing, the X-Box will be running a version of what up to now has been called Embedded NT--which should be extremely stipped down and quite reliable, as well as offering very short boot times. (Reportedly the PS2's boot time is quite long for a console--on the order of 5 seconds or so.) Furthermore, probably most Windows crashes come as a result of either bad drivers--which should never happen on a standardized machine like the X-Box--or as a result of problems with memory management of legacy code--again, no problem since there will be none--or with multitasking apps not behaving themselves--which won't be a problem since the X-Box will only run one thing at a time. Furthermore, 64 MB of RAM should be more than adequate, considering the lack of multitasking and the fact that the OS will be much much leaner than normal Windows or NT.

On the other hand, I have to say that the prospect of an 8-gig hard drive scares me a bit, if nothing else than because it offers the possibility of quite a lot more complexity and variations in end-users' actual setups. I doubt MS will allow anything like DLL hell to manifest itself, though; I'm sure the X-Box OS will keep every program's DLLs seperate and well managed, especially since this is a (more like the) feature of MS's upcoming-and-stupidly-named Windows ME.

Phew. So--do I think the X-Box will be phenomenally successful? No, not really, I don't. While I do believe that it will be more powerful that the PS2 on a theoretical level, I don't know if the difference will shine through in the games. Basically, there are two possibilities: most X-Box developers will try to keep their games as trivial ports from their PC counterparts, in which case they won't be able to take advantage of the uniformity of having a single machine to develop for, and thus the PS2 will be more impressive, or X-Box developers will try to "program to the metal", in which case they will be a year behind on the learning curve of low level programming, and thus their games will probably never decisively beat what's coming out for PS2 at the same time.

On the other hand, I think that it just might be successful (depends on if the PS2 actually conquers the world beforehand, as many predict), and I'd give it about equal odds to succeed as, say, Nintendo's Dolphin.

Hmmmm.........a big ass peltier sandwhich, water block and hoses, and a small freezer with a radiator coil should take care of that. Sounds like a job for Kyle

Just got ours, Ultra66. Flash the bios. 100 Ohm resistor from pin 16 - 23 (Don't pull out the bios - just solder. over the top or underneath.) Reboot and sweet.

Jim.

Don't know if it'll work, but sure as anything it'll be a lot easier for newbies:

Delboy

Here's a link to a story on the Aureate mess a friend sent me.

It was linked to from hardOCP, they didn't give any story.

Worlds largestBSOD?

I'd much rather have this case: http://www.hard ocp.com/news_images/2000/february_2000/clearcase.j pg.

Talk about open computing... =)

Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

*clears throat* NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Don't ever think of selling it. Get a copy of *shudder* Windows 98, then visit HardOCP to get some ideas.

Some guy already did that, the link was at HardOCP awhile back (not sure where it is now though). It was pretty cool, especially the fact that he was asking to be sent more, because he had run out...and the color scheme left, uh, something to be desired. =]

here are my submissions...

HardOCP -burning silicon

CapAlert -burning witches

FUFME -uhh, fish

PADI -neoprene

Java -burnt coffee

Burnt silicon smell and www.hardocp.com.

:)

Here's the Hard OCP review of the Afterburner (from the link).

Let's buy 1000 P3125 Alpha Coolers and overclock this thing to Kingdom Come!

• Sharky Extreme
• Ars Technica
• AnandTech
• Hard OCP
• Ace's Hardware
• CompHardware
• Tom's Hardware
• The Tech Zone
• Thresh's FiringSquad
• Review News

--

Check out Hot Hardware and HardOCP for the scoop.
--

I mean, for all of you saying "he should've spent his money on an alpha", would you had rather loaded up a fairly boring page with pictures of an alpha box?

Sure, the costs and time involved in putting together a system as he did are fairly high. So is buying one alpha or xeon processor. Plus you wouldn't get the fun factor and enjoyment from tinkering around when you just slap down a few thousand on a typical high end system. At the cheapest, overclocking means taking some $50 celeron processor and juicing it up (usually with a few fans and a peltier unit) so that it runs faster than a $400 processor. The -40 C goal is to take advantage of properties of CMOS components when they get that cold (there's a graph of potential speed vs temperature at the hardocp). Once you hit low enough temperatures, you have the possibility of doubling the clock speed.

It's not going to be the same as spending $3000 on a high end xeon processor, but it's a lot more fun, something a lot of you are forgetting in the name of price.

I read something to that effect here. They're using TEC elements and anti-freeze ro run it @-57C or so.