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ABIT KT7 With Built-In CPU Multiplier Adjustment
Peter H.S. writes: "Abit and Asus seems to release AMD K7/Duron motherboards, with adjustable
cpu multipliers.
No more 'golden fingers' hardware hacks.
OC from the comfort of your BIOS.
This is truly good news. Check
[Insane Hardware] or Abit's homepage, etc." The actual scoop at Insane Hardware says, in part, "The KT7's SoftMenu III has special added features and functions that will allow the maximum performance and enhancement tweaks specifically for Athlon based CPUs, such as FSB settings from 100MHz to 183MHz in increments of 1 (84 settings). Moreover, ABIT has added CPU Multiplier Factor Adjustments, allowing the user to choose the proper multiplier factor."
This news should have been about AMD's new cpus supporting alterable clock multipliers, not about Abit's motherboard. All of their boards with SoftMenu II or III have supported that for a long time. It reads like a glorified advertisement.
CMOS battery dies, and the defaults are loaded every time. That either means the CPU is detected and set to normal speed every time, or it does what a few old PII boards I saw did. They underclocked the processor all the way down to 100 somehow.
BIOS with the options to set the CPU can also detect what CPU is installed and set parameters correctly. Why do you think it was ok to install a lower voltage CPU like a Celeron into a board with no jumpers that previously had a PII or similar?
I know it's a bit silly to answer to oneself, but
I got annoyed too hastily.
Abit KA7 has also SoftMenuIII and Slot A
Something to consider to juice up 500MHz K7
Yka
that's good enough for me. my work is finished here. hope you don't lose two points of karma over this. i would feel guilty or something.
Intel has one very important thing AMD doesn't: Developer support. With that I mean that they provide optimized math and signal/image processing libraries and optimizing compilers. Using an Intel tuned BLAS library (standard number crunching library) instead of the reference implementation written in Fortran 77 is much much much faster. So while higher clock speeds might impress home users that play games that extra clock speed wont help in scientific computing if you can't use a good implementation of number crunching libraries. (I can't run the intel libs on my AMD K6).
Seriously though, when cmos data is lost the abit boards just run at 66mhz fsb with cpu default voltage and multiplier until you enter the settings yourself which then persist until the next cold boot.
;)
While I'm not sure about asus boards as I have yet to see what they do on losing CMOS data, I suspect they behave similarly.
Of course, there is also the hybrid option that seems to be rather popular. MBs that can be set by either jumpers/switches or BIOS (though only one or the other at any given time of course). If the battery dies on one of those you can just fall back on the hardware if you aren't using it already.
BIOS-based cpu settings are damn convenient yet dangerous in the hands of the inexperienced, true... but IMHO a warning about the dangers of overclocking and the voiding of warranty is sufficient. If joe average tries to overclock his cpu and reduces it to slag it's his own problem after all.
Protective measures like making cpu settings jumper-only is a downward spiral (make something idiot proof, they make a better idiot). People don't need to be protected from themselves so much as they need to be educated.
Smoking a cpu would be one hell of an expensive lesson, but they'll learn one way or the other.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
Face it. Knowing how to use a Phillips screwdriver does not mean you are, or were ever, a hardware geek.
A few examples of what might qualify you as a historical hardware geek:
1. Using a propane torch to sweat soldered-in 256Kx1 DRAM chips out of scrapped non-PC memory boards so you can get all 640K on your motherboard for cheap.
2. Salvaging ribbon cable connectors for reuse in new configurations. Extra points if the connectors originated on non-PC hardware.
3. Recovering and reusing an old stepper-motor-indexed hard drive with a defective track-zero by gluing a little tab of metal onto the index wheel to offset physical track-zero in a bit on the platter. Extra points if this means you have to reduce the cylinder count by a few to get it to work.
4. Getting a 720K 3-1/2 floppy drive to work with DOS 3.3 on your XT motherboard.
5. Powering PC hardware with more than one linear-regulated power supply.
6. Fitting a standard-spacing motherboard into a case that started out with a different motherboard with non-standard spacing for expansion cards.
7. Overclocking a motherboard by actually replacing the quartz crystal (or clock module) on the motherboard itself.
8. Using a null-modem cable (must be home-made) to transfer files from one computer architecture to another.
There are certainly other examples that I can't think of, and can't remember having done in the past.
When I upgraded from a PII 266 to a Celeron 433, I had to get a new case because the slocket I was using wouldn't fit in the old one (power supply in the way). I know that's not a normal situation, and I wasn't changing manufacturers, but it shows there are a few instances when you would need to replace your case to get a new CPU.
Clocking from the soft menu inside the BIOS does not work so well with many VIA Athlon boards (KX/KT), this is shown by the ones that have both a Soft menu in the BIOS & dip switches on the board itself. With many of those boards it you have the dip switches all off (or sometimes all on, depending on the board), so the FSB defaults to the soft menu, one is only able to clock 'em up from 100mhz to about 108mhz, however when one uses the dipswitch to overclock the same system components one can often get up to arround 124mhz. Yet the multiplyer hasnt been touched. Check http://www.techphiles.net/reviews/asus-k7v/page3.h tml You'll see what I mean.
In the case of AMD there is NO remarking risk. Upon startup the cpu is queried for it's preferred multiplier which is then set using some of the pins. Instead of using the response from the cpu these abit boards let you interfere with this process and set your own multiplier..
This might not be news to all you guys, but Intel DOES make non clock locked PIIIs. I happen to have one and I can alter the clock multiplier from the "suggested" 6 - I had it running at 8*133 for a while, but I stuck the MB it's on in a small case, and cooling was an issue. (Where does one get one of these? Ask a friend who works for a company that gets ES chips from Intel.)
;-)
PS: ES = Engineering sample.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
Well, this is nothing new, but you didn't even have to crack anything open before. I figured this was something everyone already knew.
I bought a MicroStar Motherboard and AMD (600) CPU back in March, and my BIOS allows me to simply "wheel" my clock speed up in very small incriments.
Of course the one bad thing about that it that very few of those speeds are actually stable.
Not to mention non-ACPI support on the K7M for Windows 2000. Every time I try to play a game, and move the mouse, and play a sound at the same time, the computer REBOOTS! Not even a blue screen!
The device manager claims that every PCI device is using IRQ 9. Shit. No way to fix it, and no word out of Asus. Abit KT7, here I come!
-Jeff
That's why /. posted it under the AMD logo, it's reeally news about AMD t-bird chips not so much the motherboards. But obviously hvaing an unlocked CPU is useless if mobos don't have manual multiplier selection possible
They probably did this to enable jumperless configuration, but the ease with which overclocking can be done is a nice bonus for people who are so inclined. On Socket A processors, there are four pins that tell the motherboard what settings (multiplier, FSB, and voltage, IIRC) to use. The motherboard then generates signals that go to the processor on another pin to set it to a particular multiplier. Theoretically, the BIOS will only echo back whatever the processor told it to use. In practice, the BIOS can ignore what the processor says and set up the processor to run at whatever multiplier it wants. This is just the first motherboard to take advantage of that capability.
(More details here, at Tom's Hardware.)
Likewise...I'm running a K6-III-450, a K6-2-300, and a K6-200 here, and have never run into problems with any of them while running Win9x, NT4, Linux, or whatever (only thing I haven't tried on them yet is NetWare, and I have no reason to believe it wouldn't work). I see a K7 of some kind in my future...(most likely a Spitf^H^H^H^H^HDuron due to the lower price...)
_/_
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
How is it different from normal PC133 SDRAM? I could find anything on it in the usual places.
-- Kirk S
It seems to me that I remember that Tom's article stating that the *method* the AMD uses is overclocking friendly, not meant to be overclocking friendly. Since certain settings in the CPU are controlled by a responce from the MB, it allows VIA to add in features taking advantage of that. This hardly has to do with AMD itself.
What's a sig?
1. Using a propane torch to sweat soldered-in 256Kx1 DRAM chips out of scrapped non-PC memory boards so you can get all 640K on your motherboard for cheap.
Even more fun - soldering memory chips on top of others to get lowercase support on old TRS-80's.
2. Salvaging ribbon cable connectors for reuse in new configurations. Extra points if the connectors originated on non-PC hardware.
Done it...
3. Recovering and reusing an old stepper-motor-indexed hard drive with a defective track-zero by gluing a little tab of metal onto the index wheel to offset physical track-zero in a bit on the platter. Extra points if this means you have to reduce the cylinder count by a few to get it to work.
All I can say is... huh? =]
4. Getting a 720K 3-1/2 floppy drive to work with DOS 3.3 on your XT motherboard.
Done that too... and using a strange Microsoft-made 8088->286 upgrade board (its biggest selling point was "Runs OS/2!") =]
5. Powering PC hardware with more than one linear-regulated power supply.
::looks over at his linuxbox with 5 120mb-540mb IDE hard drives, 2 old 1x cdrom's and 2 powersupplies:: 'Nuf said.
6. Fitting a standard-spacing motherboard into a case that started out with a different motherboard with non-standard spacing for expansion cards.
Not only requires a screwdriver, but a hacksaw's good too, and a file is nice to have...
7. Overclocking a motherboard by actually replacing the quartz crystal (or clock module) on the motherboard itself.
Ah, the days of the original IBM AT...
8. Using a null-modem cable (must be home-made) to transfer files from one computer architecture to another.
PC->TRS-80... great stuff there too.
Sometimes the old hardware can work just as well and is always a helluva lot less expensive... and of course you get the fun factor of hacking your case all to hell...
BRTB
A 5? No way. Anyway, Intel and AMD have nothing to do with this directly. AMD locks thier chips as well--any company does. You should know that with pricing ladders, overclockinghurts business. Since processors go up in price almost exponetially as they climb the clock-ladder, overclocking removes tons of potential income. AMD is a business just like Intel, not a charity--if you think AMD is some gift from God to help consumers out, you're wrong. They're out to make money--just like any other company in the world.
What's a sig?
Old Athlons don't OC past 10% of their FSB. So you could only realistically get 770MHz at best out of it unless you used a Peltier, but I would still take the extra 70MHz.
Burning out a chip is harder than you think, unless you do something really boneheaded without knowing what the cpu you use is at least theoretically capable of.
I have no idea where you're getting your Overclocking How-To info from, but if you think overclocking is using water blocks, radiators or liquid nitrogen, then you're way off.
Like many thousands of others, I run my Celeron 300A at 450MHz and have done so for the past 2 years. It was as simple as going into the bios at boot-up and uping the FSB from 66MHZ to 100MHz (in incremental steps!)... It didn't cost a dime and took about 10 minutes to do safely.
Of course not all CPUs Overclock this well but that's the trick behind Overclocking; knowing what cpu to buy and what needs to be done to overclock it to a level you're comfortable with.
These new boards form Abit and Asus make teh whole process even more fool proof.
Bah.. Compaq used the same technology, licensed from Rambus, in their 5xxx Workstation. Using EDO ECC DRAM, (think SIMMs, on crack, from a SGI) 2 per bank in twinned banks, you only got a 40% speed increase. Maximum speed increase wasn't seen until all 4/8 banks were filled, and even then it topped at 65%
.sig: Now legally binding!
If you want a really stable machine, buying the next-grade hardware is a Good Thing.
But I am also a long-time hardware hacker...longer than most of you. I got the money to upgrade to a 1200 baud modem doing 256K memory upgrades on the Atari 800 computers. That's back when you had to glue a bunch of chips "dead bug" onto the PC cards and solder jumper wires around to the address bus. Plus cut the extra voltage traces.
My computer is a lot more powerful now, but it was a lot more fun back then. Everybody had the same basic machine (so the software was compatible), but the experts tweaked their machines in different ways.
Within the limits of sanity, HW hacking is great fun.
... do this?
:-)
I understand that there is the remarking risk... but how bad is it?
I think CPU's should handle the clock like the Dragonball... let the user set the PPL. If you are "silly" enough to run it at all-kinds-of-crazy-speeds then you deserve the "interesting" results... but to just run it a _little_ bit faster... that's okay.
Just a thought...
later.
Sure you can argue with Moore's Law. It's not a law, it's an observation. Well, it was an observation when he made it ten or so years ago. Now it's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Chip manufacturers aim to double computing power every 18 months. It doesn't just happen automagically.
With the exception that ABit is using the older KX133, while ASUS is using the newer KT133 set. Same south bridge (686A), improved north bridge. ASUS drops one PCI and has the evil AMR crap (at least it's on the bottom), but the chipset improvements are worth it. They also toss in a bunch of extra USB ports *shrug* and, for you IDE freaks, have an option for an ATA-100 controller onboard (in addition to the ATA-66 that's part of the chipset).
[ wow... never thought I'd pimp ASUS. ]
__
--
"Never trust a Programmer who carries a Screwdriver."
So... tell me truthfully... ARE there REALLY any
chipset combinations for mtoherboards that really
ARE stable at fsb speeds higher than say...
115mhz?????
Yeah.. 180+mhz fsb would be nice.. but is there
really any hardware that can take it?
*sigh* Tired of the hype... *shrug*
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
It has to do with the 16 bit drivers used during the boot up, and don't forget when NT came out in 1996 8 gig was pretty big. Even the new pIII boxes that come with 20 gig drives have NT on a 1 gig boot partition, the rest of the disk is formatted after the install.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
the software ought to have a control-panel CPu speed slider, maked off with "reasonable," "unstable," and "Halt and Catch Fire."
Hehehe... didn't know that... musta missed it in ;)
;) hehehe
;)
all the frackas going on
Good to know though... hope they bring out more
boards with these features...
And I paid 60$ for my overclocking card
Worth every penny though...
Thanx for the info
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
Well.. slap him with a crowbar and call him :)
stupid.. but I think the 20 minutes he spent
reading my post just paid off.
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
The rough basics of the idea is that they (being Intel corp.)
locked the multiplier on-chip.
There's not been a way to change that from the mb
if the feature is not present on the chip. This leaves bumping up the FSB as the only way to
o/c your cpu.
Amd has (for as long as I've followed the company)
not locked the multiplier on their chips.
In fact... they manufactured their slot-type chips
with gold-fingers (contacts) that allow you to
use an aftermarket or homemade device to change
the voltage/multiplier on-chip.. without having
to manipulate the fsb.. (fsb changes usually lead
to instalbility)
I'm speaking out of my nethers when I say that
it's my belief that when they changed to the socket
cpu design they introduced the abiltiy to control
this from the mb and bios... no gold fingers..
just extra pins that do the same functions.
This is just the first mb that has taken advantage
of those options.
I love AMD... I've used them since their K-6 series
first came out and have used them ever since.
My athalon 500 runs peachy at 750mhz with no
fsb changes and I couldn't be happier.
Let's give another cheer to Amd for making this
new motherboard possible.
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
The only way abit would have been able to
implement that would have been to attach a dongle
to the mb that you would attach to your
athalon cpu after cracking the case open.
With the slot technology there is no way to
change the multiplier or voltage settings on the
cpu from the contacts that are inserted into the
mb proper. Only the addition of a tweaker board
on the goldfingers, that (IMHO) were so gallantly
designed and made available, are you able to overclock a slot athalon.
It seems they've changed the story with the socket
athalons and this is now possible to do from the bios.
Besides... do YOU see anywhere on those socket
athalon cpus that you can attack a goldfinger card??
I know I missed it if it's there...
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
Since dad upgraded to this 600 mHz Athlon, my time online gives me more quality time than when we had the ol' dx2-66. It's a real screaming scroller and dad says he'll sell it to me cheap when my paper route grosses $1200 in a month. Talk about easy upgrading, and I won't have to worry about frying the cpu.
1) jumperless processor tweaking (not new by itself)
;)
2) console-based chip multiplier changing
3) Duron support, which is neat considering that Durons are brand new, and will have at least one speed-enhancing MoBo from a reputable company basically from launch.
There are a lot of people who would like to play with overclocking but are too butterfingers to follow all the "Careful, this will void your warrantee" blowtorches-n-dremel tool directions of hardcore, "fine-line-between-treaking-and-destruction" insane overclockers. At least, I know there's at least one person in that category
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Expansion cards would only makes performance/compatibility matters worse IMO. I think the real solution is a single chip with integrated CPU (possible multiple CPU's), RAM (L1, L2, + as much system memory as possible), North/South Bridge Controllers, LAN, Graphics controller, sound, etc... Yeah, that would pretty much mean that everyone's choices of computer configuration would dwindle down to a few combo models, but the tradeoff is well worth it IMO: The price would be lower (once we can get down to sub 0.1 micron BICMOS of course) there would be hardly any OS related hardware setup issues since every OS could have 100% support for every single Single-Chip-PC config available (since at the most, there would be maybe a dozen different ones available from different manufacturers), and the pesky memory bandwidth/speed issues of current systems would be all but gone, since everything would have direct access to memory and the CPU/GPU. Apparently AMD's Sledgehammer, which is supposed to eventually have multiple CPUs on the same die, will also integrate the North Bridge controller. This could be a case of trickle-up economics, as future high-end systems would be come more integrated like "low end" systems (I815 etc...) increasingly are today
The newsbit says that you can O/C the duron motherboard bus speed up to 183 Mhz (or something like that)... I heard that you can only O/C the bus up to something like 130 Mhz before your video cards start to fail? Sorry i'm an O/C newbie (i got a Pentium 2 hehe)... If this is true, i'm getting a duron asap :)
Honestly, I think that VIA is the bane of AMD's existance. If you want an AMD CPU, you're pretty much forced into a VIA chipset, which IMHO give AMD a bad name. Incompatibility issues, stability problems. It's a shame.
He just did say that about SIMMs.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Combine that with BIG RED FLASHING warnings about how badly you could fuck up your system if you adjust these settings without knowing what you're doing, and MOST of the non-technical users will never touch them. They get worried when they see BIG RED FLASHING warnings and they steer clear of those settings.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
>After all that time looking, I was getting nowhere...so I checked the BIOS settings and low and behold, his computer was overclocked...he had been told that it was normal & natural...no big deal. Except that this machine was crashing about every 20 minutes...
Overclocking is like drinking. Know your limits. Do it responsibly. Don't judge all OCers by this one guy. He learned his lesson.
>So before you get excited about this, I just wanted to point out that sometimes the better solution is to not try and get that extra 20% or get that extra 20% through distributed computing (e.g. Seti@home).
I can't get increased frame rates in games through distributed computing.
I know dating back to the PII's and Celeron's chip companies have been "clock-locking" their cpu's to prevent overclocking and mislabeling, but I was under the impression that the lock was on the cpu rather than the motherboard. I was pretty sure that AMD did the same thing and that was the reason for needing golden hardware hacks. Is the restriction actually on the motherboard, and if so how come no motherboard manufacturer did this before?
"I don't like this deep shit about crazy crap"
Uhh... this has little to do with AMD. They don't even make the chipset on these boards; VIA does. ABIT "saves the day", just as they do for Intel-processor-based systems, by putting lots of fiddly timing options on the motherboard/in the BIOS setup.
AMD does not multipler-lock their processors in the same way Intel does, though. Intel claims this is to deal with remarking, not to discourage overclocking, and I believe them. "All of the overclockers" is actually a fairly small community, and while they may be important as early adopters, they probably don't have much influence on revenue in the long run--except to vendors of cooling hardware :)
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
256K? I've swiped 16K chips off of boards! (Used a solder sucker to pull 'em off an Atari 5200...haven't used them for anything yet, but they ought to be usable as spares for my Apple II+ if any of its memory goes tango-uniform.)
I had to trim a memory-expansion card with a Dremel once to get it to fit...does this count? :-)
_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
A trusty old K6-266, the historians among us could tell you about it's whopping 523 BogoMIPS. But since they probably are tired I tell you instead.
This is great for all of the overclockers out there. Just when other companies are taking steps against overclocking, AMD comes in and saves the day.
actually I have one of those here, I bought it as a PII233 but the multiplier is unlocked up to 4.5 so I can run it at ~340MHz. Now if only I had my BF6 2 years ago, damn I would've owned in Q2 ;-)
Way to go ASUS and ABit!
Now we can tuck in our cheap Durons or expensive T-birds and overclock to our hearts content! According to Toms Hardware the three Duron 700 and one Duron 650 they tested were all overclockable up to 950 MHz, and the T-bird 1000 to 1100, all at 1.85 V.
Now all we need is motherboards with chipsets supporting DDR memory...
/Dervak
Those of you in North America may wish to use this link... faster server, fewer pages to wade through...
I don't agree. Lots of people buy computers in stores where they put these annoying stickers on 'em so they can see if you opened the case (like on harddrives). ;-))
...
So if you want your warranty you can't overclock (and put the clock back when you take it back to the store because it melted
On the other hand, anyone who would just buy a computer in a store probably never even heard of overclocking
Since the days of running more than one brand of CPU on the same motherboard seem now to be in the rearview mirror, is it time for affordable standardized passive backplanes? Wouldn't it be nice not to have to replace motherboard and case just to do a processor upgrade or be tied to one CPU manufacturer?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
AMD is doing what Intel should have done. The problem with unlocked chips is that they get remarked. The rips off customers, pisses of resellers and makes the manufacturer look bad. So how do you fix it? One solution is to multiplier lock the chip so it can't be overclocked without OC'ing the FSB. This sucks. Increasing the FSB also overclocks the PCI and AGP ports. This can fuck a lot of older cards. The other approach is to allow easy identification of the processors rated speed. This stops the remarking and doesn't cost you the enthusiast market. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that this is the solution the market will reward. (all other things being equal - which they never are.)
Back in the days of the P5, when remarking was at its height, Intel refused to release software (which it had developed) to identify the rated speed of a proc. Once this strategy started hitting them in the pocketbook (like I said, remarking is bad for everyone) they decided to stop overclocking (and thus remarking) by locking the CPU.
Why? Because Intel is a heavy handed company that doesn't give a shit about the end user. This is why they're forcing Rambus down our throats. This is why they haven't produced a chipset that even approaches the 440bx. This is why they refused to admit that the i820 with MTH was flawed for months after they released the buggy thing. That's why the Celeron still runs at 66mhz fsb.
Go AMD. Down with Intel.
--Shoeboy
This is my concern - overclocking is a great thing to play with if you know what you're doing and don't mind the risks involved. With the hype surrounding overclocking and tools like this, there will be more people who have bought into the "overclocking is more for free at no risk" hype. Some of who will be dissapointed when they do reduce the lifespan of components, start getting intermittent crashes, and so forth.
I'd much rather have them fix existing products instead; especialy ASUS has atrocious enduser support and doesn't seem interested in fixing severe bux in their products.
Examples?
* P5A bios doesn't support harddisks > 32 GB (crash on boot). No released fix available. (there is a beta bios you can dig up if you look hard enough).
* The IDE Busmaster NT drivers for K7M Board don't support harddisks > 8GB (NT only sees first 8GB). No fix available from asus.
Guess how happy I am about buying a K7M board to replace the old P5A because I wanted to use a new big harddisk.
* Have a look at their own discussion board - lots of user questions and bug reports, absolutely NO reaction from asus tech whatsoever.
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Please be informed that I have e-mailed the FBI and ATF about your activities here. You are urging people to use dangerous drugs and providing links to illegal information related to controlled substances. Be prepared to be raided soon.
I sincerely hope you and your dope-fiend friends resist and they'll have to put you down.
Well, there are two answers. One, for those of us with well paying jobs/living at home with little-no rent and any job at all, it's partly old habit, partly to keep the old skills tuned up, or even advance them further. I remember back when I got my V3 2000 (before I had a job), I attached one of my old 486 cooling fans to it. It rocked! I was able to OC the damn thing another 16mhz on top of no cooling, for free! I still have that V3, still OCed, this time with an undercard fan solution, and clocked even higher. Also, there is the point that, yeah, if you've got the cash when your upgrading, you can go for the next speed up. All well and good, but what about when it's time to upgrade? Well, if you've got much OC experince, and a good CPU, or graphics card, or whatever (CPUs mostly, I'll admit), then you most likely spend the $20-50 to get some extra cooling and OC your CPU by 100-300mhz (for modern CPUs, Celeron, slower Coppermine, Duron, Athlon), rather than the $100-250+ for the new speed grade of CPU. This holds true even more highly for the OCers that are 1)unworking collage students, or 2) still living at home, for two reasons. One, if it's their own cash, they aren't likely to be getting more than what they've got right then anytime soon, and two, they can more easly justify smaller purchaces.
So, before you go asking yourself why we complete nutters would go and roast perfectly good hardware, well, now you'll know. We are or where poor hardware geeks, and we love to get into our cases and try to fry shit.
Passive backplane systems are almost exclusively used in Industrial Control applications, and usually cost 2-10 times as much as commodity hardware. I don't see the point in buying high-reliability Industrial Control hardware at a considerable increase in cost just to make it easier to upgrade. Plus PCI-buss passive backplane designs are usually more proprietary than any standard hardware that seats in an AT or ATX footprint.
Do what you like, though.
"Increasing the FSB also overclocks the PCI and AGP ports. This can fuck a lot of older cards."
Can you expand on this a little. I'm having some trouble with a new (to me) S3 Virge that occasionally locks up (and ALWAYS locks up when I use xscreensaver/xlockmore).
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Yep. What a shame that yet another 3L337 activity is turned into something any dork can do.
Wait-a-minute.... anything that only involves a phillips screwdriver is dork-work.
The true elite have wire-wrap guns and soldering irons.
slot 1 motherboards with the BX chipset have had long lives. you can run any pentium 2's, most pentium 3's, and all celerons. that's not bad at all.
in my case, i have a socket 370 BX chipset motherboard, and with the help of a Neo S370 adapter, it's on its second CPU. adapters are inelegant, but hey, it works.
i think that it may be a while before the PC world sees a chipset as versatile, powerful, and stable as the BX again, so ultimately i think you're right.
"Am I the only person who thinks the 72 pin SIMM was the pinnacle of module design ?"
ugh, you've got to be kidding! DIMMs are much easier to install. and even easier to take out. you certainly can't say that about SIMMs.
i agree that it does suck, though, especially with the high cost of Athlon motherboards.
why not just buy a dual 600MHz asus board and stuff two 600mhz celerys in there with a slocket card ? it'll cost ya $300 or so but you get the same or better performance.
im still waiting for amd to release dual cpu boards *sigh*.
I noticed that the Asus board link was omitted. Asus' board allows CPU external (FSB) frequency settings to be set in 1 MHz-increments or reduction.
Very similar to Abits board, but unfortunately it has less expansion slots (1 AGP and 5 PCI, while the Abit has 1 AGP, 5 PCI, and a PCI/ISA combo).
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
This will give every user the chance to overclock his/her CPU and complain about the instability of the software without too much effort... Now you can even crash Linux...
You found a sword: +4 damage, +5 moderator points
You are right. The real news is, that AMD might release Durons without multiplier locks. I don't know if AMD really will do this, though the Abit press release seems to imply this.
I submitted the story, and looking back, I can see it was a really sloppy submission:
It was really unclear whether AMD really was going to remove the multiplier lock on new Durons. Without AMD doing this, the story becomes a non-story. (Even my old bx-board support adjustable multipliers.
The focus became skewed toward a particular MB manufacturer's rather tame, (and perhaps misleading?) press release.
All in all: a sloppy, underresearched, skewed and speculative submission from my side.
Not good.
Six monts after I bought my Athlon 500 with
Slot A connection they now have invented a new totally different Socket A
This sucks
Yka
You just take the battery out and put it back in. I've done this a couple times getting my Pentium III 550 up past 616 mhz (5.5 x 112 fsb). It immediately works again after you put it back in.
Get paid to code OSS
Why is this news? Abit have been making jumperless motherboards with BIOS control for years now, with SoftMenu I/II/III, for just about every type of cpu out there (I swear by them). Is it because it's a non-Intel cpu? If so, why didn't the KA7 (Abit's Slot A board will all of the features of the KT7) or the KA7-100 make the same news when they came out several months ago? You are truly odd in what you decide to post, Slashdot. :)
I have never actually owned an Abit motherboard but you have to appreciate what they do with their spare time (read: dual celeron BP6, etc).
The cool thing about some of their motherboards is the Winbond Hardware monitoring chip that they use in some. The lm_sensors package allows linux users full use of the hardware monitoring features. Use it in conjunction with frontends like KLM or GnoLM.
Also, the "one MHz step" thing that they have can be used from inside linux. I mean, you can change the FSB from inside linux (in one MHz steps) because of the clock generator that they use.
Im not knocking other manufacturers, but I have found Abit to be a linux overclocker's best friend.
Useful Links:
FSB Utility for Linux
The lm_sensors Homepage
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o/c da world!
So... what happens when the CMOS battery dies? This isn't a troll, I honestly want to know.
Personally, I think that the best solution is to add a few jumpers and do it that way. Anyone who doesn't know how to open the box up and set a jumper or two should not be overclocking. This isn't eliticism, IMHO, it's for the user's own good.
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Even the classic Athlons could be set to the "proper" multiplier. The only catch was that you had to open the CPU casing and attach a goofy widget. You can see a review of Athlon GoldFinger devices (GFD) here, or if you're a DIY kind of person, the specs are here.
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
doesn't seem to make any sense to me...
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
there are only a very few motherboards that will have this feature. asus, abit, and maybe epox. there's still conflicting info on the epox board.
anyhow, only reason i know this crap is that, while my linux box is just dandy, i'm really wanting a gaming machine. and well, the duron, and easy overclocking.... just to good to pass up. so, i've been reading as much as i can...
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
Thats there from I believe the BH6. Certain chips around the 350-400 range could have the multiplier changed. But they were rare at the time, and probably next to impossible to find now.
Both Slot connections were just Intel and AMDs way of packing cache chips on a special connection to the CPU. Now that they've both got on-die, full speed cache, it's just not necessary anymore, and I suppose having one more PCB/case/larger heatsink in the slot design adds $5+ to its cost.
With AMD, at least, you can still get their newest CPUs in slot or socket form, though, so you don't have too much to complain about.
To the people who want a "common backplane" - great, but whose? K7 based chips and PIII based chips use totally different bus designs now. Someone would have to heavily retool their chip designs to make them work on common motherboards.
I know most of this forum is real big into OCing, but for the majority of users it is definitely the wrong thing to do.
A couple weekends ago, I spent four or five hours looking at someone's computer to solve the frequent crashing problem he had. After all that time looking, I was getting nowhere...so I checked the BIOS settings and low and behold, his computer was overclocked...he had been told that it was normal & natural...no big deal. Except that this machine was crashing about every 20 minutes, and he had no need for the extra speed.
So before you get excited about this, I just wanted to point out that sometimes the better solution is to not try and get that extra 20% or get that extra 20% through distributed computing (e.g. Seti@home).
AMD's new socket-A interface is used by Duron, Thunderbird (i.e. new Athlon) and will also be used by their Mustang due out later this year.
If you buy a socket-A Duron or Athlon now, you'd also have the option of upgrading to a dual SMP 760-MP DDR based mobo later this year.
Do you happen to know where GnoLM can be found? The original maintainer/author has moved his page, and it's not there (although some other Linux projects can be found there), so one can't get it from freshmeat. I've tried both an ftpsearch and google for the tarball and can't find it.
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
I sent an email to Abit tech support when the Athlon first came out suggesting that they implement an onboard multiplier modifier function, but they said they had no intentions of supporting the Athlon at the time. I wish I still had that mail. Abit, if you are listening, please reply to this and I'll give you the address for the check.
The Voices cannot decide on whose base belongs to whom.
but for the wrong reason. You see VIA at one point released a chipset designed to put sound, video, modem, etc... on a Super 7 motherboard.
:).
The actual chipset sucked. Or at leased seamed to suck because the motherboards that ran with it sucked. However it still holds the record for the coolest chipset name I have seen.
It was called 'GRA'. Since it was made by 'VIA' the label on the board read VIAGRA. The fact that Socket 7 was old and near impotent at the time didn't help matters much
On to CPU sockets and Slots.
Why do AMD and Intel continue to pretend that CPUs are upgradeble ? It's been years since I have seen someone upgrade a computer by changing the CPU alone.
This is not a coincidence. Whenever new chips come out the older motherboards don't support them properly for one reason or another. This has even happened with Motherboards that had clock settings up to the higher speeds.
Typically a motherboard is limited to the fastest CPU currently on the market at the time it is released. If you save money by buying that board with a slower chip when it comes time to upgrade you generally find it prudent to simply skip the highest chip the board dose support and get a new CPU and board. Along with new RAM in some cases.
And speaking of RAM. Am I the only person who thinks the 72 pin SIMM was the pinnacle of module design ? Somehow the DIMM sockets we are all so fund of these days feel like they were designed to break easily. Having to push straight down with great force ( relative to what a SIMM requires ) doesn't help much.
It all feels like a scam but at least I can fondly remember those cheerful days when you could look a customer straight in the face and calmly recommend that he get viagra for his aging PC.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Here is his take on this...
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.