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Athlon Overclocking - The AfterBurner
NoWhere Man writes "Over at RB Computing (an AMD-only shop in Ottawa, Canada), they are distributing the AfterBurner, an Athlon Overclocking card, developped by Golden Fingers. It offers on-the-fly frequency and core voltage modifications, that is a reasonable alternative to building your own, as shown at Tom's Hardware Guide. "
Is this really cost effective? I mean, you could probably get a better performance/cost ratio by SMPing two processors, each 3/4 the speed of the one processor you were going to overclock.
Or, am I missing something?
I spoke with the owner, and he said the afterburner works quite well. He actually sells systems pre-configured with the device in place.
Rock-on, but won't this (can this?) hurt AMD's sales for the high-priced, high-speed chips?
Since it requires no software support (even the hardware dosen't know it's there), it should work with linux, any of the BSDs, windows, V2OS, Mach, DOS, any of the Windows (including 1.0), CP/M, App-specific OSes such as Kings Quest 1 and 2, and Zork 1-3, and any other x86 operating system you'd care to mention.
Here's the Hard OCP review of the Afterburner (from the link).
-no broken link
The hard-wired multipiler lock of the Athlon (and awful motherboard support, you can't argue that) were the only reasons keeping me from upgrading to an Athlon. Instead I'm using a Coppermine 500E and I have it overclocked to 700MHz (5.0*140) on a Soyo 6BA+ III motherboard with an IWill Slotket II.
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
The cache divider is not controllable through the Athlon's edge connector. In some cases, higher overclocked speeds may be possible by changing the cache divider from its default setting of 1/2 to 1/3.
:-)
I'm no overclocking master, but are they suggesting you cut the L2 cache speed from 1/2 core to 1/3 core? Why on earth would you do that? Let's say your core frequency is 800 MHz, and your L2 runs at 400. If you overclock it to 900 but your L2 cache is only running at 300, surely you're getting worse performance overall than you were before...
Is this just another example of the blind worship of the almighty MHz? I think this is the first time I've seen anyone sacrifice performance for higher core processor frequencies...
Or have I just forgotten everything from my architecture class?
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
$125 for three switches, an Rpak, and a connector?
Wow, that seems steep considering the cost of the
parts.
I've modified a couple of Athlon 500s (which both
turned out to actually be 650's based on the legend on the chip itself) to overclock at 750.
It just involves moving a few SMT resistors. This
board just gives you easier access to selections that are already possible.
Seems to be rising. Anyone with other numbers?
I bet a fair number of 500Mhz Athlon cores can do 750Mhz but are held back by the cheaper L2 cache they run. Getting a 750Mhz chip at the cost of a 500 aint too bad, even if it isn't as fast as the "real" Athlon 750s.
I read Ars Technica and Toms Hardware Guide often enough to know that it's all fun and games, and there are clans and cults of overclocking out there, etc. And if I wanted to, I could get into it and build myself a monster machine.
Well, I don't wanna. I'm too lazy. I've got this aging Pentium Pro/200 system that's slow by todays standards, but which has served me quite well, and actually I just don't wanna mess with hardware anymore.
This doesn't mean I don't want to *own* the fruits of such activities, though. I'd love to have the absolute screamingest machine that a couple G's could buy, and I'm sure there's someone out there that would be happy to provide such an elite box o' power for a small price.
Point is, does anyone know of any companies that build these sorta monster boxes, or is it just better to go with a good quality hardware vendore like VA Systems or something like that for my 'leet hardware needs?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Overclocking, today, is pretty silly. It's rather expensive and doesn't really provide that great a benefit. It's mostly an exercise in macho tinkering, done to brag about the top speed more than to actually run the thing.
However, it was entirely sensible when Intel released a whole pile of Celerons which were perfectly capable of running at half again their stock speed, with no special cooling hardware.
It didn't make sense not to to overclock, in that case. Intel's marketing department decided to lie to everyone about what these chips could do so they wouldn't cut into their high-margin market.
However, chip manufacturers have now learned their lesson: a few people will always test to see if their chip is really as slow as the spec say, and if they learn otherwise they'll tell everyone else over the internet. So they will build their chips to run slower if they want a slow chip to sell at a cheap price, and make damn sure that there is no cost-effective way to run it faster. The golden days of overclocking are over.
I jumped on the BP6 bandwagon when they were released with a couple of celeron366's at 458. BTW I got off-week celery's at a good price and hoped for the best for 504 and didn't work.
q3a supports SMP, only in WinNT. I bought q3a expecting SMP code to be in there for linux, but Carmack doesn't think it's nessecary to have SMP in linux. That rant is for another day though =) I grabbed Win2k early to get a natvie DirectX and SMP support. The only thing I saw was complicated aps taking 50% cpu power. I never got the voodoo 3 driver to work in WIn2k quite right, so I didn't benchmark q3a with SMP(the drivers from NT game palace is you must know)
Kernel compiles in linux only take a couple minues, but that's about the only real use I get out of SMP. Linux distributes the processes wekk enough, but I rarely do something that really taxes the machine, besides q3a and compiling kernels. And GCC is the only thing that uses both. About the only REAL benafit, is that I can run GCC with only one job, and it doesn't tie down the system.
With just about every OS now supporting SMP, including WIn2k, OS X, linux, etc., when will companies start writing apps that take advantage of it? Is Win9x holding SMP back because it doesn't support it?
I've said it once, and I'll say it again! The biggest bottleneck for SMPs is the concurrency supported by the cachememory link. Not bandwidth, not latency, not capacity, concurrency.
If you don't match the concurrency of your memory link with the concurrency of your clients (i.e. processors), you're hosed for any demanding application.
What do I mean by memory link concurrency? It could come from crossbar versus bus, or multi-ported memories, or from multibanked (interleaved) memories.
Cray has zillion-banked memories. Processors now have multi-banked caches, because there are lots of things going on at once inside out-of-order issue processors!
It's all about concurrency matching!!
nick
I'd rather buy this:
e cs/tech___specs.html
http://www.kryotech.com/Products/superg/Tech_Sp
It's a barebones athlon based PC overclocked to 1Ghz, and it comes with a 1 year warranty.
I'd rather have someone else to blame if I happened to fry my machine.
Mike
Sure, I have a thankless job. That's okay. I have a lot of (non
180 $ for Athlon 500. + 70 $ for NinaMicros overclocker. = Athlon 700 with slightly slower cache. For under 200 bucks, I have a slightly slimmed down Athlon 700. I don't see a PROBLEM with this. Do you? (And yes. Most reports indicate that you can overclock an Athlon 500 up to 700 and have it run just as reliably as a real 700.)
Overclocking is great. Heck, any hardware hack is great. And it's not about 'sticking it to the man' either.. it's simply about knowing how to *use* technology instead of being enslaved by it.
When I buy a PIII, I'm not paying intel for the right to use it at a certain frequency, I'm paying intel for a chip that *they* have guaranteed will run up to a certain speed. Over that speed, and you are on your own.
Now.. when the Celeron 300A was out, and you could easily clock it to 150%, heck, that's fantastic. A real money saver... spend $30 on extra gear to cool it, and you were set.
Now.... do I spend $75 on extra fans/heat sinks, when I could buy a chip that's rated at a a similar higher speed for about the same added cost? Sure.. it might cost me a few dollars more.. but then I *know* it will work too.
Like.. Kryotech.. now, those Cool athlon 1Ghz jobs have major geek cool factor, I'll admit, and I'd love to have one.. but realistically, I could be 2 other full machines for the price of just their base model, each machine being around 600Mhz anyway.... so why would I bother? What good would it do?
I want one that mounts the switches on an unused drive bay, kind of like Creative is doing with their sound card connecter bay 'Live Drive' or something like that. Then I'd need some big assed knobs that go up to 11 like Spinal Tap had. That way everyone knows I can crank that Athlon up anytime I want to.
Bleh!
-jwb
The point was that overclocking is a result of intentional under-rating for marketing purposes. There may still be some stuff out on the market for which it is practical, but now the chip makers are clued in to the fact that they can't get away with just underrating their own chips in the documentation. Someone will catch the lie.
The reason they would make it hard for people to overclock is that they would rather sell you the more expensive chip. Courtesy to customers is in damn short supply, which is why low profit margin cars are built to disintegrate in time for the new model to come out ($6000 construction cost for a $10000 car that lasts 5 years, or $10000 construction cost for a $50000 car that lasts 50 years: looked at as individual jobs, the latter is much more profitable, but to a long-term industry, they are close to equal; fairness doesn't even come into it). In theory, competition is supposed to wipe out these tactics, but industries always have these little understandings that member companies will follow even to their own demise, like a daimyo refusing to arm his troops with modern guns and change the face of Japanese feudal society even when he'll be defeated otherwise.
Already a couple of years ago I thought about how nice it would be to have a gas pedal under the desk; when playing or compiling, you could speed the system up like a car... of course it's pretty idiotic idea. And now, it seems, anyone can do just that.
NOSPAM@REMOVETHIS.NO.SPAM - you'll find the real address somewhere
At least you can encode your cds to mp3 on both CPU's :)
125.00 Canadian dollars = 86.41 US dollars
Exchange rate: 0.691300
Rate valid as of: 1/10/2000
Perhaps it's also getting harder to overclock these CPU's as they're getting faster, faster than the FSB is getting faster.
Take for example: with a clock multiplier of 6 on a 100 Mhz FSB (600Mhz chip), upping the FSB to 133 MHz boosts the CPU to 798Mhz (198Mhz gain). Compare with a 400Mhz chip (multiplier of 4 on a 100Mhz FSB), upping the FSB to 133 will boost the CPU to 532MHz (132MHz gain). In both cases the CPU speed has gone up be a factor of 1/3. But perhaps CPU's are not effected so much by the factor, but the shear amount.
I'm no hardware guy: I don't know the effects of increases MHz and heat on these increasingly smaller dies. Maybe somebody would like to dicuss this (and probably point out the error of my ways.)
I tend to agree with you. There are better ways (of course, depending on how you use your machine though) of boosting performace. You can get a dual Mobo with 2 Celeron 500 for about $20 more than a single MoBo and a P3 500. In my experience Celerons are very good performers, and this is a really good way of getting something vastly faster than a P3 500 for roughly the same price.
Incidentally, I've just ordered the parts for a dual P3 system (I got carried away when I came across a good deal whilst looking around at Slockets). Hopefully I won't be sitting around waiting for Visual C++ under NT for so long in the future. As I work from home, I can't afford take risks with my computer crashing due a minor instabilty caused by overclocking. I almost bought that dual Celeron hack the Abit-BP6, but I don't think that it is stable enough for me to risk not being payed for time spent recovering from a crash.
From what understand, Linux doesn't scale past 2 CPUs at all well. It has it's arse kicked by NT which scales better.
This is true; however, the course-grained semaphoring in Linux is at this very moment rapidly being replaced with fine-grained semaphoring. When this is complete Linux likely may start beating NT in the large-cpu configurations.
Okay, for my peace of mind, my interpretation of what you said be (please correct me if I'm wrong)...
... // Lots of processing
... // Do more processing
... // Lots of processing
... // Do more processing
Coarse grained being (sorry, C++ not C):
someObj::someFunc()
{
myMutex.lock();
mySharedObj->doSomeSomthing();
myMutex.unlock();
}
Whereas fine-grained would be:
someObj::someFunc()
{
myMutex.lock();
mySharedObj->doSomeSomthing();
myMutex.unlock();
}
As the fab for a given process became more mature, the defect level usually decreased. So at the beginning of a product cycle, you got more of the slow parts and fewer of the fast ones, and over time, more parts were produced with the higher speed ratings. Over time, then, the price of the high-speed parts declined.
Then Intel reinvented itself as a consumer products company, and started pricing ICs the way GM prices cars. In the auto world, a luxury car costs maybe 30% more to build than an economy car, but sells for perhaps 3x as much. Intel started doing this for processors, with advertising-promoted brands at different points in the speed spectrum. The interaction between this policy and the way fabs actually work resulted in some deliberately undermarked chips, and the rebirth of "overclocking" as a semi-respectable enterprise.
Then some distributors started shipping systems with overclocked CPUs. Some even printed fake part numbers on the chip package. This led to trouble. Intel may have lost some revenue, but worse, they were getting a reputation as an unreliable IC supplier. So they added holograms on chips, part ID info readable from software, and speed-checking (which is hard; CPU chips ordinarly lack an on-chip timebase.)
Today, IC fab yields are so good that the part-selection approach is rare. If parts are failing, the fab has a problem. CPU speed and model has become mostly a market positioning thing.
In the industrial computer world, underclocking is common; the temperature margins improve, and so does reliability.
At this point, Intel and AMD are competing so hard on speed and price that neither can afford to undermark. So overclocking is a marginal idea at best. Gamers are probably better off getting a new graphics board.
Pricewatch:
Athlon 700 MHz - 496 at tufshop.com
497 at econopc.com...
4 listed ~500
2 listed ~529
more 583+
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I had a pair of bitched-up Cel366s I (I think that was the speed) -- anyway -- one I tore apart and the die was welded directly to the heatsink pad, which is opposite of most chips and I believe the same as the 'flip-chips'. I don't beleive that process was unique to the E-series P3s.
:-)
The other I drilled a hole in the corner and is on my keychain.
Most of what we did on the departments alphas at Iowa State sucked cycles--when they were running, which was a small fraction (Gad, SAS is a pig). It turned out that (most of the time) an extra 32M or 64M for each extra user was enough to avoid most of the swapping, so that unless both jobs launched at the same time, the person sitting at the unit would never even notice the extra users.