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Asus A7V Overclocking Confirmed
NoWhere Man writes: "It seems that a few Asus A7V Socket A motherboards have reached the market despite AMD destroying the hopes and dreams of overclockers everywhere. A&I Computer has a few boards and has been able to reach 857Mhz. Buyoverclocked.com also got a few, and overclocked to 900Mhz, a picture of the switches is here.
For those interested in overclocking the Thunderbird, Tweak Town seems to have found a way to remove the cpu mulitiplier lock"
They happen to be talking about the Socket A ASUS Thunderbird/Duron mobo, which is called the A7V. The K7V is their older, Slot A based mobo.
"I live in a world of make-believe, with faeries and leprechauns and tiny little frogs with funny hats."
Is there some reason why you can't just fit those switches to later versions of the motherboard ? Have Abit just fitted links, or removed the holes altogether ?
Say the average life of your processor is 10 years.
Say then that overclocking cuts your processor's life in half.
You still have a chip that will last 5 years. Who has a 5 year old computer? I mean they exist, but we're talking a 486/33 as a top-of-the-line kick-ass computer from 5 years ago. Besides, most people that overclock buy cheap chips so that if they do fry them, they can afford to replace them.
Example: The 333 Celeron, the most overclockable chip in the world - I have a friend who is running a dual celery board with 333's at 500 - a gigahertz clock rating at 1/3 the price! These chips are only about $40 bucks. And 500 mhz isn't bad, not even today.
insert clever line here
sig?
From Tweaktown:
"AMD have announced to us that they will be introducing a special Fab of Athlon with performance enhancing cache that will be multiplier unlocked. Award and AMI have also told us that they will be helping with a new BIOS code that will prevent remarking of the unlocked Athlon with performance enhancing cache. Also we have heard that Award and Ami will be introducing a scheme to prevent resellers relabelling the CPU. According to the information received, Award will introduce a feature that will read the AMD Athlon CPUID code and will display the actual CPU's designated Speed and the overclocked speed. Eg. If you have a Athlon 2 700Mhz and have it clocked at 900Mhz on boot up the motherboard will bios will show up as: AMD Athlon 700 at 900MHz. This will prevent resellers from relabelling the 700Mhz CPU as a 900MHz for example."
I didn't think it was possible to love AMD any more than I already do. Then AMD comes out with a way to solve their problems (reseller fraud) AND keep the fringe users happy. All it took was a little extra effort by AMD, and it WILL pay off for them when it comes to PR. Kudos AMD.
-GS
------
Let me give you the lowdown
First of all, you use of the phrase "some of them" is hittin' the head on the nail. It's important to understand that the majority of overclockers are -not- able to spend more $$ on faster chips, and certainly don't have the money to spend on expensive cooling systems.
;)) and other such things do it for other reasons than simply price/performance:
;)
That said, i think that those who do have the time/$$ to throw on peltiers (that fluorinert experiment was insane even for overclockers
Simply put, overclocking is a hack. hacks have value (to some)...it's not a matter of -why- do it, it's -can- it be done...can -I- do it.
it's all in the spirit
Your argument is pointless. Office systems should never be overclocked (it isn't yours to screw up). For those who don't need it, it's pointless. And not everyone can afford a U2W SCSI system with multiple parallel disks, not to mention that SS disks are insanely expensive.
1)I will enjoy aving the higher MHz for games. while I know it won't matter that much, I'll enjoy it.
2)I do do video encoding (I'm not kidding! its REALLY SLOW right now!). Haveing those extra MHz matters.
3)It doesn't really affect stability. Here's why: AMD realizes that they make the most profit by making two different CPUs, Thunderbird and Duron. The Thunderbirds are all THE SAME, but by selling some as "faster" they can make a lot more money. Now, some really aren't quite as well made, so mine might not work at 900MHz, but I think it will. Also, if I don't increase the voltage, thenn I can overclock all I want without permanent damage, provided I keep the chip cool. At some point, it just stops working right though. Its unstable, so I bring it back down a bit.
4)I really would rather spend the extra money I save by buying a 700MHz over a 900MHz on a new graphics card, more RAM, a better disk, whatever. While I don't NEED the extra speed, and hence won't pay for it, I would use, and hence will try to get it.
Electromigration is the only thing that can cause physical damage to the chips besides frying it due to overvoltage. But they both end up doing about the same thing to your chips.
You don't know what you're talking about. I have a running 6 and 7 year experiment with electromigration, and guess what? This hasn't been a problem, period. I have a 486/66 and a Pentium 100, bother overclocked, that have been running overclocked the respective times, 24/7, barring power outages. The motherboards are about the only thing in them that hasn't failed. The fans went, the drive (in the P100) failed, the CDROMs long since died, the floppies died, but the CPU's keep on mackin'. The power consumption is to the point where it almost equaled the cost of the machine, but, it's an experiment to see if the CPU (will ever) fail. That and they make nice servers.
Electromigration is something that while well documented in theory, I have yet to see cause a problem. One of my electrical engineering professors has a old transistor collection, and you can see a decay in Beta (B) of these devices, so the gain characteristics have changed a fair bit. This is _much_ more of a problem in a analog transistor, where the preformance is supposed to be linear. In a CPU, the transistors are acting as switches - and as long as they switch, everything is fine.
Heat failure is completely different. Heat goes up, resistance goes up, circuit goes to hell, and the magic smoke comes out. This is what happens when the chips fail due to overvoltage - you physically burned out the circuit. THIS IS NOT ELECTROMIGRATION!
Anyway, that is an explanation of what happens when overclocking goes bad. There's a few white lies in there, but without spending weeks explaining electrical theory and physics to you, it's the best way to explain it. :)
You don't need weeks of physics and theory. If you overclock, you up the clock rate of a CMOS process. Power consumption goes up correspondingly. More clocks, more power, more heat. Too much heat, you burn it out. Better chips can handle more current, thusly running cooler, and therefore be able to run faster. Your watch is CMOS too; It can run for years because it's clock rate is 1Hz.
The problem is that you now have less energy available to generate those higher frequencies.. the clock signals are weaker. Of course, this results in instability and other problems (retransmits, blah blah blah). The solution is that if you want it to run at that higher frequency, you gotta increase the voltage to boost the signal... and take the chance of frying your chip.
This doesn't make any sense. See above comments. Right now, I mildly overclock my athlon. There's nothing that even comes close to making it run slow, so I'll overclock it heavily when games catch up. I suspect this is what most people do.
..don't panic
>I'm not the kind of person who would pay thousands of dollars to trick out a lousy car with a stereo system and 18 racing stripes...
;-p)
Ah yes... the <A HREF="http://www.riceboypage.com/">Riceboy</A>
phenomenon...
(currently running two Celeron 300a s @450/464, a PMMX 200 @ 250/266 and a K6-2 500 @ 500
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Hi there! ...
;)
Overclockers usualy are 2 type of peoples:
-one do not have enough money,...:(
-the other want to be on the top of the world with the hot-new-fast-and-overclocked CPU at that time
CPU premature aging is not an issue because new processors are coming out very fast and the overclocked ones behave very well after years too... But if you want mission-critical-stability then don't overclock it.
Till now I haven't managed to "fry" my overclocked CPU-s
Just my < 0.02$
Cheers,
Just another coder...
the K6-2 500's are not
at least, not AFAIK.. but maybe they were, i never really got into them.
anyway, some chips
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Actually, no... except for the memory, you are not overclocking the PCI and AGP, or the rest of the board. 100 MHz is a standard speed, and the whole system should be very happy with that. Speeds like 75 and 83 would be a problem, since the standard divisors don't work there, but 100 is the way things "should be now". 4.5 * 66 = 300 4.5 * 100 = 450. That's why the Celeron 300a was/is one of the easiest overclocking chips. You can hit a nice speed point without overclocking anything but the CPU (unless you use PC-66 memory.... but that's just dumb).
300 => 450 = stable motherboard speeds.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
C'mon, this is OLD NEWS . I have posted this link numerous times in the past. Get a clue, Slashdot.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
I bought a Duron here in the Netherlands which is indeed locked (I believe one of the first actually sighted). We've also figured out a way to remove the lock, so after doing that you can use the thing on an A7V with dipswitches again. We didn't have an A7V, so we modified our Gigabyte micro-ATX to be able to set the multiplier. A full account can be found here. Removing the lock in this way will almost certainly make you unable to turn it in for warranty servicing, so you anti-overclocking zealots can rest easy as well. Jasper Janssen
Yes, except that just about every game is NOT multi-threaded (with the notable exception of Quake III Arena), and therefore can't take advantage of more than one processor. And don't even get me started on trying SMP with Windows 98. Also, it would cost you more than $300 for a dual 550 setup, because SMP motherboards cost much more than single processor motherboards.
Just remember, 2 * 550Mhz processors != 1.1Ghz of processing power for most games and other common applications. Although many people on eBay would like to tell you different.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
They overclock for the same reason people tweak cars. It's fun, it's enjoyable, and it's something to boast about. It's the geek equivalent of hot-rodding.
When people modify their cars to extract that extra 10hp, same reason people put on huge watercoolers to go that extra 50MHz.
Sure, it's mostly boasting - I mean, some of those high MHz computers don't get great uptimes, others do, etc.
I don't know what we call people who perform 'safe overclocking' - like bringing a Celeron 533A/566 to 800/850MHz (almost always guarenteed), though. Casual tweakers?
About the class A current (or crossover current). I should have made it more clear why I though it might be important. I don't have any experience with the sorts of cmos geometries used in microprocessors but I have played around with push pull drivers that act a bit like a cmos output stage. The cmos output transistors are surely designed with threshold voltages to minimize overlap but the crossover current still occurs. The current pulse has a length that is dependant on operating voltage but not frequency. Therefore, as frequency increases, the crossover current pulse increases a larger portion of the clock period. This will result in a linear increase in power consumption...
I went to the fridge and forgot what I was writing about. What the hell, I'll submit his anyway. whatever
Ryan
If you scope the power supplies on your
boards, you will invariably find that
the cause of burnouts at elevated speeds
is due to voltages above specs, which allows
them to push out more wattage thru a
given impedance without laying out the bread
for better parts.
First, there are thermisters on chips
which allow for checking temps in the chip
[get yourself a copy of 'waterfall'].
Split up your power & filter the noise
& pulldown, so the elements of the
chip are all operating on your edges.
In this fashion the voltage & drop total
into the chip will be reduced yet
fully operable at elevated freqs.
A properly tuned power system ought to
allow for a 10% increase in speed yet
with a safety factor to the chip
better than your average board.
Its your big name houses that
*OVERDRIVE* your chips so any 'weak'
chips won't drop out. Overclocking is
just the icing... much less dangerous
when tuned properly *BELOW* specs
than chips at 'standard' operational
configurations.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
One of the more remarkable aspects
of dental caries is that the
trauma to the cheek tissue is
signifigantly greater than
the turgor elaborated about the
damaged roots in many patients.
Sounds like radiation damage
caused by a MICROWAVE LASER
None of those problems should be happening. Better hard disks have MTBFs well above 1 million hours, you get error statuses when they fail, and RAID is an option. Fan failure should be detected; most servers now have internal temperature monitoring, as well as multiple fans. "Spontaneous memory failures caused by atmospheric raditation" are almost unheard of, and if you have ECC memory, they're corrected. Cabling problems remain a big issue; the CEO of Inktomi reports that mounting the power cords on their servers so they can't come out fixed their biggest cause of downtime.
Now OS uptimes need to improve to match.
Yeah & maybe mom&pop are really only
selling little brown squares of plastic.
Maybe nobody called the cops or threw a
rock through a window or spread rumors about
turkies like you who never changed batteries
on a flashlight.
Quit blowing your grits sm3lling
breath at kids doing things that your'e too
inept to do. Is Bill Gates paying you
off to misinform our kids... are you one
of those 'Spinmeisters' who get paid to
misinform the public on the Internet?
Most of these guys know, you don't
know what your talking about: that most
products are overbuilt and to get
the best for your money only means
knowing how to restrap the 'cripples'
on the product to makr them work right.
The chip companies *have* to overbuild
their chips or throw out 90% of them.
They do it but they don't like it...
So they hire human garbage like you
to bad mouth the kids so they feel like
they're doing something bad by making
technology live up to its full potential.
Picking on kids, you must be real proud
of yourself, do you get paid by the comment
or per hour... cupcake.
Is that grits you got splashed in your
ear... cupcake. Do yourself a flavor,
take a vacation or we can talk about
your stange emotional problems... cupcake
-30-
You can make many new friends
& rid yourself of strange maladies
by shouting out in public places;
"Damn Free Mason, female, fascist,
freaks [O.E.S.]are burning my [insert
correct body part here]
with MICOWAVE LASERS"
But then agin why buy a car that can do 150mph when the speed limit is closer to 80????
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
Speaking of reputations, COMPUSA seems to
have a rep but *I* wouldn't trust them.
Had this uniboard hp package my girl
picked up to ween me away from my c-64.
Supposed to have a 130Mb II inside.
6 months later,when I get interested,
it craps out, they & hp are giving me
this who covers what routine.
Spent a month until these guys got
together. [I sorta did DOS off a diskette
setting up a Ramdisk]. So now they
confiscate the unit for about a week
& come back with, they can't find a new
processor. {I guess they were waiting
for a new one to to be left in swaddling
cloth on their doorstep.]
So they come back... they only got a 100Mb.
I figured 30 Megs isn't worth fighting about
Everytime I hit an applet i NEEDED a new
browser.
I got this Spark 1 gig ext, thigamajig
so compusa buys computer city & I'm sitting
on 12 jiga bytes I can't access & 'usa
isn't honoring my agreement. [That's 3
reputations that time.some one of these
days I gotta cut the damn thing open & glue
theplastic doodad that open the door back on.
Trust in God... all others pay cash.
| X |
You have never truly been in love
until your gonadotrophins
have been stimulated
by the Order of the Eastern Star,
sometimes known as Venus,
Sometimes knoen as Lucifer.
You can be played like a puppet by
stimulating your internal organs with
the effects of a MICROWAVE LASER
[[...wish I had something meaningful to say.
//////// the generated /////// [assuming you can ///// ////. this ////// ///// simulating ////// larger //////
How about overclockers are just tryign to compensate for undersized penises]]
Don't you worry 'bout us overclockers
son, we at least get a little daylight on
our bones runnin' down to the hardware store.
We worry about people like you,who sitting
in the midst of a world like this have 'nuttin'
to say.
As for our undersized thigamajigs you
gotta be blind! Maybe I should paint stripes
on it so you can see it better,
The same psycho sexual forces that
drive us to mess with the forces of nature,
to put $500 worth a chip on the line,
make us just swell with pride...& swell
& swell. Son, we are steel drivin' men.
As for you guys sittin' in the dark
drinkin' Jolt Cola & waitin for someone
to give you someyhing to do, here it is.
Even tho you uninspired listless
dudes don't measure up, You can trick
your partner, whoever or whatever that
may be, by
lubricational
inspire that] from the
will increase the relative frictional
forces of the
the insertion of a
than you may find available to you.
I hope I've been of help.
|X|
You have never truly been in love
until your gonadotrophins
have been stimulated
by the Order of the Eastern Star,
sometimes known as Venus,
Sometimes knoen as Lucifer.
You can be played like a puppet by
stimulating your internal organs with
the effects of a MICROWAVE LASER
>>>>>>>>
:. p=e*e/r. calories=.24*p] your heat
Not a good idea, the power drop in the
cpu [p=ie expressed in voltage e=ir or
i=e/r
is going up w/ the SQUARE of your voltage
multiplied by 38000000 xistors.
I would back it off now.
You gotta' increase available amperage by
putting more copper in you power coils to lower the impedancs.
Some chip house just just announced
overclocking its chips by changing operation
voltages from ~1.67v. to ~1.36v. I would follow there lead.
|X|
Since Geo. Washington, the officers of
the Armed Forces have all been
Free Masons, which may be why
their Russian Brothers had our
troop movements before our men did
in Korea.
VA doctors have found neither
chemical or biological
justification for the Desert Storm
Syndrome. Perhaps our officers
are punishing our men for what
they did under orders. Symptoms
created with a MICROWAVE LASER.
Would you believe
an ammonium maser?
>>>>>>>>>>>
This assumes that the positive values of the
clocking square wave increases w/o the an increase
in the area of the 'off' aspect of the wave.
Lets see by changing the shape of the
clocking wave the amount of wattage
dissippated in the chip can be reduced. [After
all its the edges,not the area of the i^2r
that does the switching.
|X|
You can make many new friends
& rid yourself of strange maladies
by shouting out in public places;
"Damn Free Mason, female, fascist,
freaks [O.E.S.]are burning my [insert
correct body part here]
with MICOWAVE LASERS"
But is the performance gain really worth it?
I'll give you a definitive "maybe". It just depends on your board, your CPU, and the phase of the moon. Stability is king here.. there's no point running at 733 instead of 700 if your Quake3 game sh*ts itself every 10 minutes. "YMMV" is the key acronym here. :)
why are you cheaping out and then risking not only your warranty (or blowing it altogether) but the life of your CPU?
Okay, first, you're talking about electromigration. Electromigration is the only thing that can cause physical damage to the chips besides frying it due to overvoltage. But they both end up doing about the same thing to your chips. As we shrink the die size of the CPUs down, we are moving the gates of each transistor closer and closer together. Now, silicon is just as suspeptible to expanding due to heat as any other chemical, and what happens is that as those gates expand, they start passing more current. More current = more heat. Now the more current that is passing, the more likely it is to "jump" the gate and short the adjacent gates - current is going where no current was expected. This results in (at the very least) a performance hit AND system instability. In the worst-case scenario, you blow your chip as the current spikes and the gates fuse.
Anyway, that is an explanation of what happens when overclocking goes bad. There's a few white lies in there, but without spending weeks explaining electrical theory and physics to you, it's the best way to explain it. :)
Now, the risks are that every time you increase the voltage, you increase current. You increase current, you increase heat. Current is what causes heat, NOT voltage.. however ohm's law dictates that if you increase voltage and keep resistance constant.. you increase current. See above. It is worth mentioning that if you can get your chip to run stable at a higher clock speed without increasing the voltage, you're not going to damage the chip any more than normal operation, practically speaking. Yes, there will be a (slight) increase in heat production due to the higher frequencies.. but really it's not a Big Deal(tm).
The problem is that you now have less energy available to generate those higher frequencies.. the clock signals are weaker. Of course, this results in instability and other problems (retransmits, blah blah blah). The solution is that if you want it to run at that higher frequency, you gotta increase the voltage to boost the signal... and take the chance of frying your chip.
So why the risk? Because a 550 MHz chip can sometimes be $100 less than a 600 MHz chip. It was also discovered that many chip foundries are having unusually good yields (especially the Celerons) so they had to mark the 600, or even 700 chip down to 550 to maintain their pricing structure. A glut of high quality chips would ruin their market.. so they just remarked them.
If you get one of these chips, it is a pretty safe bet you can overclock it AND save hundreds of dollars! Good deal, huh? But it's a crap shoot.. and there are no guarantees.
Hope this helps!
i asked a similar question (currently it is below this post), but not exactly the same,..
you can't say 'RAM is the bottleneck, period.' obviously, certain things are going to want more RAM than you have, other things are dying for clock cycles, and most things (that i run into) want your HDD to be faster.
i have 256 megs of RAM now and rarely have to make use of virtual memory. with DIMMs so cheap there's really no reason not to have it.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
CPU: Geniune AMD Athlon 900 MHz
CPU Clock: 1000 MHz
the idea that AMD and teh chipzilla multiplier-lock their cpus to "protect consumers" is a load of bs that they dump on us. the reason that they mulitplier-lock is so that if enthusiasts want 1000 MHz, they have to purchase the 1000 MHz part ok bye.
loev,
Axel
mhm23x3, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose
Id stay away from locked stuff whenever possible. Why run yer processer at 500 if you can run it fine at 700, 800? Im running my old k6-2 400 at 500 for over a year and half (at 2.8 core voltage!! ;-) and it is still alive, crunching seti@home packets 24*7. All you need is proper cooling... And the cpu would rather crash than burn out, so no danger. If you can't find out your sys is overclocked, youd better not buy one at all ;-)
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
at least, not more than 0.00001% of the time.
i worked at best buy, as a technician, for a year, and i have a lot of experience with local 'mom & pop' (so to speak) computer retailers as well.
they are not going to bother testing every cpu that comes back.
also, much fewer people O/C than you'd think, looking at the gazillions of sites and articles devoted to it.
so, basically, this is not something worth worrying about (besides which you can return it too, no store will ever refuse to accept your return if you keep the receipt,.. just keep insisiting. believe me, they will cave in.)
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
- the stores send 'returned' items back to the manufacturers (who test things thoroughly before selling them to OEMs or just trashing them. some unscrupulous OEMs like Acer sell pre-used hardware as new, but that is a separate issue.)
- O/C rarely permanently damages a CPU, it would require a high level of stupidity to achieve this. and if it was damaged, it would show up right away, regardless.
- the clock speed/multiplier is, of course, stored on the motherboard, not the CPU. so, they're not going to return it when it stops working at 9999999 GHz, they'll just set the clock back and all will be well (i know, i ran my 366 at 800 for a lark, and well,.. it didn't work too good, clem.) if they are dumb enough to return it at this point, that's fine, you'll buy it at a discounted price for being pre-owned/returned and have a perfectly working CPU.
thanks
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
My personal view: I'm sticking with Intel for a while until after my next CPU upgrade (PII 400 is going to a CuMine 700+, hopefully by the end of the weekend). I'm just easing myself away slowly from the Beast That Grove Built.
Switching to the Apollo Pro 133 (from an old 440BX that was past its shelflife viz. BIOS upgrades) was a no-brainer due to the i820 fiasco (yeah, it's not that great of a chipset, but it was still US$50 cheaper than another 440BX, even though I have to jump through hoops every time driver upgrades are released to get Windog to respond to their existence; BTW: there's been some complaints about its hacked UDMA66 implementation, but it works fine once drivers are installed). And thanks to the fine people here at /., I'm sure as hell not going to touch a Willamette. So the next iteration of AMD past T-Bird will certainly end up being my next CPU.
(NOTE: I'm a hardcore gamer that stupid bought an inexpensive generic Vortex2 soundcard that, like those asinine Winmodems, uses some proprietary hardware-based calls to Windog for various purposes. Until the sound card's upgraded and WINE will do games properly, Linux is not an option.)
The Spie, who curses Wintel's implementation of P&P...I WANT MY JUMPERS BACK!
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?
well first of all K6's were never a highly recommended potential OC chip,..
OCing is most successful with Celerons (so far) especially 300A, 366, and such.
i wouldn't even bother trying it on a K6-2 500, of course that is going to cause problems, that's a poorly designed chip running as best it can already (nothing against K7s, they're great,.. K6 is not my bag.)
anyway, as another poster says above, with a lot of chips, especially those Celerons, the manufacturer just made a whole bunch of the top-o'-the line chip (in the case of the Celerons i believe it was a 450 or 500?), but the demand for the mid-range ones was much higher
the thing that also helps Celerons is all the cache is running at core speed.
i recommend looking up some great articles that Ars Technica has on this subject.
(and VERY few people go through the trouble of buying those big fan arrays, let alone spending much time screwing around with it. i spend exactly 30 minutes overclocking my 366 to 453.)
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
I build a lot of systems for people and make them deals on my old CPU's some I frequently go up. "I'll make you a deal on the 500Mhz Athlon so I can buy a Thunderbird" and so on. Overclocking doesn't pull me very much when I can keep my CPU speed up there pretty good. My wife had some surgery awhile back so I haven't upgraded since the Athlon 500Mhz but it is getting to be time again.
I used to work at a computer store testing returned equipment. You be surprised how much stuff is obviously O/Ced and messed up by ignorance.
He still blamed the Taiwan earthquake on Q3 99 stock loses
I know Michael Dell is a little egocentric, and a lot of people seem to think the world revolves around money and profits, but..
How the hell does Dell's stock price dictate the stability of tectonic plates?!?!?
.sig: Now legally binding!
good post
i wish i had moderation ability in this thread
ars has some good OCing articles, as does sharky extreme, curious parties should head over there.
(sorry i'm too tired/busy to look up the full URLs
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
You're not a true geek until you've successfully hacked some hardware.
--
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
Let me rephrase that. AMD is looking out for it's non-overclocking customer base by trying o prevent this. It's good that you've had this success (I imagine most modern chips would probably yeild about 100mhz, however it's been argued that there's a reason that buffer is there, anyway grats on the OC), and I'll assume that if you had fried something trying to overclock that you'd be stand-up about it and not try returning the chip. However I've known several people who would buy quite a few of these, and then return the one's whose electrons migrated south. Likewise the unscrupulous resellers (remember the story where they went to the trouble to repackage athlons as higher rated chips). The CPU manufacturers have a serious problem with this.
I have my own solution. They should come up with something like the slot1 and put a non-reversable hardware switch, or a punch out on the board, something that you have to physically do to OC your board, is painfully obvious that you've done it, and then let people do what they want. Hell, I might even try to build my own screamer-in-the-beer-fridge with one of those.
Either way, I'm saying that the Hardware companies, however they may be artificially inflating prices, don't want help from a few DIYers who don't feel like eating their own losses.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
How the hell does Dell's stock price dictate the stability of tectonic plates?!?!?
;-)
Careful what you ask... the Men In Black may not be amused...
--
--
"'quines' quines" quines "quines"
In addition, when I referred to underclock, that meant from the overclock.
s/People/Dumbasses/ig;
--
this is actually a really good idea. I don't think I can conceive of a way to make it technically feasible, but I'm not an engineer. If that could be done, it would be neat! The only downside is the fact that the chip manufacturers use the same die for several clock speeds, labeling the chips depending on test results post fabrication.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
I think AMD is currently making most of it's money on the 700-800Mhz athlons, not on the 1Gz version, which at it's price premium is mostly for careless spenders anyway (at least in my application area, the extra money is better spent on SDRAMS, bless the Abit KA7).
... depending on the market conditions and current yield, they might even stock up on a couple more 1Ghz versions, which they will then sell later when the improved ASIC stepping and production lines peak at 1.2Ghz.
And that's why some chips overclock better than others, and manufacturing date and location is interesting data on overclockers.com
...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
> This won't work, due to how chips are
> manufactured.
Sure it'll work. Use laser trimming to cut traces on the die before it is packages like they do for precision analog components. Or embed a couple bits of eprom on the die and program it after packaging and testing. It's all really quite simple. 1970's technology.
Ryan
Excellent but... What you describe
is the operation of a logical array
which is only one type of assembly.
I was under the impression that much of
the chip was composed of memory
which operate in a different fashion.
It would be a waste of time to
bicker over what is possibly different
on different chips. Refresh rates of memory
would seem to play a signifigant if not
constant power drop though.
With regard to dumming down try looking
up 'thevenin load' which is the consolidated
impedance at any point in a circuit model.
The idea of the affect of the clock wave
form does suggest interesting possible alternatives. Reducing noise in the power &
lowering the impedance of the power wouldn't
hurt.
|X|
A MICROWAVE LASER can put
a lump in a politically
active chest. Aluminum foil
can stop it.
had a single PII 350.
bought a pair of PIII 550's on ebay for $290.
have 2 break out the soldering gun to get power to the fans, though.
Now my P5 166 linux box will be a PII 337 (LX motherboard that I had will run at 75 MHz).
.
Ahem, you don't know how cmos works. Allow me to explain...
...ohm's law...
A cmos circuit is composed of complementary pairs of mos transistors (hence the name cmos). A mos transistor works more or less like a switch. A voltage on the gate pin allows a current to flow on between the other two pins (transistors have 3 pins). The gate of a mos transistor looks like a little capacitor. You need to charge up the capacitor to turn on the transistor. The output of each cmos gate has two mos transistors, one goes to the supply (about 2 volts), and the other goes to ground (zero volts). The gate turns on one (and only one) of the transistors to select a binary output level. If both transistors were on a short circuit would occur.
There are three sources of power consumption in a cmos circuit. (1) leakage currents (very small), (2) charging and discharging the gate capacitors, and (3) so called "class A current."
The first item, leakage, is very very small. Several orders of magnitude smaller than the other two. It is independent of operating frequency.
The second item on the list, charging/discharging current, is quite important. It takes a fixed amount of energy to charge the gate capacitor and force the transistor to change state. At higher clock rates you change state more often. Since power is simply energy per unit time, the power consumed from these charging currents is linear with respect to operating frequency. Double the frequency, double the power consumption. BTW, you can force the capacitor to charge more quickly if you increase the supply voltage. Sometimes this is necessary for overclocking. Higher voltages will lead to higher power dissipation (though not necessarily increased current (for a given frequency)).
The last item, "class A current" is caused when both transistors in a cmos output are on at the same time. Since the transistorgates have small capacitors, they can't turn on and off instantaneously. Therefore, when the gate changes state, there will be a short period where both transistors are partially on. This overlapping conduction causes a sizeable current to flow; a short circuit of sorts. This is the so called "class A current." The exact magnitude of this current is dependent on the particulars of the transistor design and the clocking waveforms. It's hard to say what happens to class A current as clock rates go up except that power consumption increases.
BTW, in the process of dumbing down something that isn't all that complicated to begin with you said some pretty silly things:
Electromigration is the only thing that can cause physical damage to the chips besides frying it due to overvoltage.
Heat, static, current, etc. Electromigration pales in comparison to soldering irons, drills, and other tools of the trade.
as those gates expand, they start passing more current
MOS has a negative tempco (unlike BJTs). They conduct LESS current when they are hot. That's why you don't need to worry about thermal runaway when playing with power mosfets.
More current = more heat
No. P = IV, you know that.
Now the more current that is passing, the more likely it is to "jump" the gate
WTF?
without spending weeks explaining
Doesn't take weeks. Cmos is pretty simple.
Current is what causes heat, NOT voltage.
No. See above.
Your processor is not a resistor. It's not that simple.
a (slight) increase in heat production due to the higher frequencies
Large increase. Greater than linear.
systems aren't you starting to hit major diminishing returns for the amount of money you're putting into the system?
When you get a system that's flying at specs that high, aren't you starting to hit framerates so fast that a noticeable jump in framerate doesn't produce a noticeable jump in performance?
I get 20-30 fps in Tribes, at 800x600 with a 300A celeron and a TNT card.
A friend of mine with a 550 Athlon and a TNT2 gets...30 fps at 800x600. His bonus is he can run up to 1280x1024 and get 20-30 fps still. My video card won't support that resolution, so I can't say if my system would perform comprably with a TNT2 card.
The only difference I notice between our performance is when we both log onto a server his machine loads the game faster and he gets to play a few seconds before I do. However, that isn't impacting gameplay at all.
Back to framerate, when you are up at 80 fps, isn't any increase above that nearly wasted? I supposed if you insist on play quake III at 1600x1200 with 80 fps, you're going to need to ramp everything up (I'm not going to go into how much I hate quake III), but how much does it affect gameplay to run the game at 1600x1200 as opposed to a lower resolution? That is assuming your monitor can support 1600x1200 at a decent refresh rate (mine doesn't even support 1600x1200), so I guess whatever money you save by overclocking you'd drop on getting a monitor that can perform at those resolutions.
no, there's no order to the preceding thoughts, I was just rambling as I listened to a perfect circle.
Moller
Yeah, the guys there hav all the pictures and the configs to sup up our Thunderbirds and Duron (all socket A cpu) ... well u gotta know how to use a southering irion....
I want to get an Athlon soon; is there an easy way to tell if it's a Thunderbird, or whatnot?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
When I wrote the above, I was responding to the original poster who was complaining about the situation where an overclock-damaged CPU would reduce the reliability of a server.
I'm assuming the "server" he was talking about was an off-the-shelf or homebuilt PC, because if you're buying serious hardware for a high availity machine you're not going to be picking out the CPU in a place where you have to worry about buying an overclock-damaged CPU marked as new.
Most "servers" in this class don't have RAID, fan sensors with built in audible alarm, hot-pluggable drives, redundant power supplies, quality motherboard, or ECC memory. You will indeed run into the problems I've mentioned, and a few that I left out- most notably power supply failures. Even big power supplies that are underused and fed clean AC from a high end UPS fail, sometimes frequently. I have a dell poweredge server that has lost 2 450Watt power supplies in 4 years. Not a stellar record.
The stock Linux/BSD distributions don't appear to support hardware monitoring either. I bet a daemon to do this exists somewhere but I haven't run across it in either the latest redhat, mandrake, and openBSD distros.
Also, about the stray radiation: Studies have shown that a computer that is on 24x7 will be adversely affected in such a way approximately once every 3 months. Most of the time it doesn't do any harm, but occasionally it does. I can't prove that it's been the cause of any failures I've seen, but I've seen a couple sealed boxes that are normally 100% reliable run for years and one day reboot due to a memory parity error.
I have to keep a bunch of machines up 24x7. Most are quality boxes, but a few are normal PCs. The normal PCs do have the problems I've described, and while most of them fail less than 3 times a year occasionally one does fail that often, so I still think that 3 strange failures a year is within the range of "normal" behavior for such beasts..
I don't like the fact that AMD tried to use chipzilla-like tactics and render overclocking impossible.
Though, my next chip will most likely be AMD.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
For me, it's all about getting the most out of my money-- as a college student, resources are limited, and if I can pull my 466 Celerons up to 700's (or something similarly insane) I've saved money that I really can't afford to spend.
I think the second reason has to do with "stickin' it to the man", as with Linux. It's some people's way of telling Intel (or AMD or Cyrix or...) we don't have to take it anymore.
Or if nothing else, it's something for nothing.
Kit
But is the performance gain really worth it? If you need those few extra clock cycles every second, why are you cheaping out and then risking not only your warranty (or blowing it altogether) but the life of your CPU? If I really wanted some extra speed in my brand-new machine, I'd spend the extra $200 or so, not blow time, energy, and then my entire investment by overclocking.
Please - teach me. I am but your sponge.
Mr. Ska
But nothing is going to stop users from overclocking their systems. After all, it's the easiest way to get extra power out of your system mostly* for free.
* - That is, unless you fry the CPU in the process...
--
Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
if (ismoderator(reader)) hidemessage(this);
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
Back in the days of Pentium I's and II's many hardware vendors would overclock CPUs and sell them as the speed they overclocked them to, like a Pentium 150 becoming a Pentium 200 or 233. How was the consumer to know it was overclocked? I'm not even sure my Pentium 233 I got from Compaq a few years ago really is a 233, because there's no sticker or multiplier jumper pin location on the motherboard. How quickly we forget.
AMD put the clock multiplier lock on their CPUs to prevent this; if you bought a Thunderbird that was supposed to be 866MHz overclocked from 800, for example, then used it in a benchmark between it and a Pentium III 866, the Pentium would win and AMD would look bad, even thoguh a genuine 866 may have beat the Intel chip (MAYBE)
The same thing happens with modems now. A 56K modem is actually a "Mo", in that it modulates but receives data digitally over the phone line. THat's why the send speeds are less than the receive speeds. and most cheap computers come with a 56K/14.4 modem, i.e. 14.4 modem without analog converter for downstream. It's a ripoff and people don't understand that. If the CPU had the same problem, there would be chaos.
By the way, I'm not entirely sure how a 56K modem works in terms of downstream/upstream and every detail of how it's different, but that's the basic idea.
So maybe you could get a little more juice out of your processor, it should be your choice. But many hardware vendors are not trustworthy enough (since it yielded soooo much profit) so the clock multiplier locks should be obeyed, IMHO.
# debian/rules
I have a celeron 300A in a Tyan Tiger S1832 MB. I can overclock the celeron to 450, but my system is incredibly unstable. yes, it gives me a performance increase of 50% on benchmarking programs, but everything else I run works fine with just the 300.
I still think that more RAM speeds up a system more than a faster processor would. Aside from that, is it really necessary to have a 900 MHz chip? Or is this just some insane pissing contest? No, really, I can buy a 550 PIII for cheaper than a 450 PII (check pricewatch). So I can have dual 550's running for under $300. I simply can't fathom what would programs would require more processing power than that! Isn't the bottleneck for most games the graphics cards? Isn't the bottleneck for most desktop apps RAM? (when you have 8 windows open and you start spilling into virtual memory).
I just really don't see the point to overclocking, it seems to be an inordinate amount of work for a small gain.
Moller
So do I....
Still trying
Or you use up 2 gallons of fluorinert (@ $500/gallon) doing it (See previous article).
Totally silly, but it did manage to knock most other overclocked systems into a cocked hat!
Despite everythjing AMD has done, I still (so far) prefer their tactics to chipzilla...I am looking to upgrade soon, and will probably get an Athlon Thunderbird. But not till I can see a way to overclock it ;)
Even with that, nowadays, its kinda hard to screw up your processor if you are overclocking. Most people who overclock know that it produces heat. You cool it down. It works. If it doesn't, underclock it. It now works fine.
Get off our back.
If it's any cpu...
:)
Celeron 366 overclocked to 550 at 2.0v
On an Abit BE6, using an MSI Slotket.
Cheapo heatsink and fan, with thermal grease.
Too damn easy
I was initially excited about the Athlons, but honestly, who cares if they can be overclocked or not!!! Why hasn't AMD developed support for a dual or even quad board??? Until they do so, I'll keep buying Intel, and I'll pit my Dual p3 600 machine against any overclocked Athlon any day.
"These are not people who use Linux because it is better; these are people who use Linux because they like the elitism t
I disagree. Everyone has read the success stories and I've even bumped my 550 to 650 with 100% success. It never crashed before and it doesn't crash now and my framerates are just a tad higher.
Just enough extra speed to crank it to 1024x768 and still play UT with no delay.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
1. Reputable retail outlets will not resell returned, potentially defective merchandise as new. They will return the product to the original manufacturer. The bulk of the major retailers fall into this catagory (compusa, cdw, necx, pcwarehouse, etc) as do many smaller places. If you are buying from a place that is not reputable, you have a lot more problems to worry about than overclockers.
2. Overclocking is safe and easy these days. AMD and especially Intel underclock some chips for purely nontechnical reasons. You might as well see what your CPU can really do.
3. Your reasoning here:
is outright wrong. I'm not going to justify this statement here because it would go offtopic, but it should be obvious.4. As someone who runs unattended servers year round, 3 lockups a year is not unusual. You're going to have problems with hard disk failures, CPU and case fan failures, spontaneous memory failures caused by atmospheric raditation, as well as misc. cabling and environmental-related failures. I'm also assuming that you have a quality UPS. I would not consider a machine that locked up for mysterious reasons 3 times a year suspiciously unstable.
Please help keep overclocking an option for intelligent enthusiasts.
-OT
There is even a rumor going around about an Athlon 2 in the future, which will be an unlocked Tbird (nevermind the fact that they still seem to be unlocked so far), and that AMD will be working with AMI and Award to make BIOSes that will help prevent the remarking of AMD CPUs by displaying the true original CPU speed alongside the overclocked speed (e.g., "AMD Duron 600 @ 800MHz").
solid for overclocking, but getting them to run in a dual MB takes a bit of fiddling, yes?
And right now, when PIII 550's can be had for $140, why not just grab two of them?
that for a great deal of online FPS games the video card was more important than the processor. I'm a college student (as the e-mail should show) and I play tribes all the time. I set up my roommates computer to play tribes, and he can actually play it on his machine, which is a Pentium Pro 200 with only like 32 MB of RAM. Why can he play it? Because I slapped a Voodoo 2 in his machine. The graphics actually look better than on my Viper V550 (mainly because tribes is native glide).
Truthfully, the main difference I have noticed in FPS games is from video cards. Save for the process of actually loading the games (my friends with 500 Athlons get onto servers much faster than my 300 celeron does), The actual gameplay itself seems to be much more video-card dependant, especially if the game is completely 3d based. This is even more true now with cards like the GEForce that do some of the processor's graphics processing work for it.
And on a final note, why does anyone need 900 MHz? Especially for games? It seems like it would be more useful to get a top of the line video card rather than a superfast processor, but either way you eventually hit the limit at which you can perceive the game. On Tribes forums, people say they've hit 130 fps in Tribes. I mean, is the difference between 80 fps and 130 fps really worth the effort and the money it takes to get there?
Moller
I have an SMP motherboard. And I'm aware that 98 doesn't support SMP, although it will still boot on a dual-processor system. (never mind that 98 sucks.) I'm running NT. It works fine. I'd like to see how much better it runs with SMP. I know that linux has much better SMP that NT, but I'm not running linux at the moment because I'm not doing any coding yet.
I'm also aware that under NT 2*550 MHz ~ 600-650 MHz, and on Linux 2*550 ~ 900 MHz (from what I've been told).
Still, I don't see what would require more power than even one 550 MHz processor. The machine I'm typing at right now runs Labview, Visual Studios, and a host of CAD tools very well, and it's only a PII 350. The main problem is Labview is a memory hog and eats up RAM, which slows me down.
Moller
with all this overclocking of chips that are starting life at 600-750 MHz,.. i wonder what kind of benefits people are getting?
i'm still running a 366 Celeron (overclocked to 453 MHz thanks to my wonderful ABit board
i spend most of my time waiting for the HDD to serve up data for the CPU to play with.
so i wonder, how much would going to a 750 MHz machine really help? what kind of applications are you guys seeing this really make a difference in (and does then overclocking to 800-900 MHz make much difference? i honestly gained about 1-5 fps in UT and no noticable difference at all in anything else going from 366 to 453.)
and again, this is not REALLY offtopic so don't even think about moderating it down! this is a GOOD POST!
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
It's the K7V not, A7V.
My next chip will be an AMD. As was my last. Overclocking is an interesting side note, but its not my primary reason for buying the proc.
Mostly it is because it is cheap. Stability, performance, and overclock-a-bility are a nice side thought, but i'm not too concerned. I like being able to compute 2 complex and 1 simple instructions per clock-cycle, but it is COMPLETELY secondary to price.
That said, since i've got this chip, i might as well overclock it. My AMD 450 is stable at 500 if you pump the voltage to 2.3V instead of 2.2V. It is even more stable at 475/2.3V however this isn't much speed gain.
I'd like to start a thread and have people list Sucsessful overclocking attempts, with Voltages and Jumper settings. If you've gotten it to work, share! I'm sure there are people out there that would love to know the real world results.
insert clever line here
sig?
(2) Once it fails, these people may return their CPU to the store as "defective".
(3) The store, rightfully never trusting the word of consumers, will test the CPU.
(4) The store's test is short and in a nice cool optimal climate controlled environment. And subtle problems that show up when the CPU is warm and been running for a long time will not appear on the test.
(5) The CPU goes back into the glass case to be resold.
(6) You (after saving up a long time): "Hi, I want to buy that CPU right there."
(7) You are now on a trip through hell. Your CPU may fail later that day (if you're lucky), or next week, or "lock up" only 3 times per year. You cannot now run your unattended server on your DSL/Cablemodem line. Your system is forever unstable.
(8) By the time you realize the true cause of the problem, the warranty/exchange period is long gone.
(9) You are screwed. And it is the fault of overclockers.
I don't want to hear about how "most" overclockers are responsible, blah blah. One person getting screwed on a machine that takes years for him to finally save up for is one screwing too many.
Overclocking needs to be blocked by the CPU itself, where it can't be circumvented. Just as laws are set up to occasionally let many a guilty man walk free rather than wrongfully convict so much as one innocent person.
Overclocking must end for the good of the consumer.
Overclock to the point that you can without buying all the extra stuff. I went from 550 to 650 MHz just by barely increasing the voltage. No extra fans.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
True, some people will try to take the "But it's cheaper this way" angle, but you're right - many times you need to buy extra stuff like fans, grease, etc, and it turns out costing nearly the same as a faster chip. If people disagree with that, then factor in the value of your time tweaking it to make up the difference. Why do they REALLY do it? For the same reason people do nearly everything - they enjoy it. They enjoy how changing the direction of a fan can shave off another 2 degrees of heat, and they enjoy the feeling of a successful tweak. Me? I won't do it. My chips run hot enough as it is, and in the long run it just isn't worth the hassle. A roommate of mine OC'd his K6-2 500 to 550 and got nothing but problems. Not obvious problems, mind you, but the oh-so-fun oddball problems like after 3 hours his video card would flicker or his system would reset. Or quake would crash on a certain level. Stuff like that. I set his chip back to 500 and it solved everything. Seeing the problems it can cause, an extra 50mhz just isn't worth it to me...but hey, if some people enjoy it, more power to them. Then again, I'm not the kind of person who would pay thousands of dollars to trick out a lousy car with a stereo system and 18 racing stripes... -GS
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Let me give you the lowdown
Thanks! I did just that. Much appreciated.
Tom's Harware has an article explaining how to get around the clock lock on Duron and Tbirds here: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q3/000711/index. html
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Unless you're a dork wasting your time playing computer games instead of hanging out with chicks, drinking beer and getting laid, overclocking is not necessary these days with fast cheap processor like the AMD Duron.
What you want is a fast hard-disk and lots of RAM and that will do. Seriously I'm getting sick of these "Celeron 300 pushed to 973mhz" type of articles.
These articles are not news!!!
There should be no performance variation between two Thunderbirds marked for different clock speeds but running at the same speed. If you had separate L2 cache (rather than on-die), you might see a performance difference because you might get faster SRAM with the faster (rated) processor; but even in that case, it would be because the overclocked SRAM was clocked differently by the BIOS, because it would fail otherwise; doesn't have terribly much to do with the processor.
Anyway, who cares if it's overclocked, as long as it's stable? Only Intel or AMD, not the consumer. Artificial pricing is a lousy excuse for deliberately mangling hardware to run slower than it should.
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
Why submit to an increase in price, when such a gain could be achieved through overclocking (and simple cooling)? Many CPUs of different speeds share the same type of core, and are bintested, starting (in AMDs case) at 1GHz, and down from there. They usually test under standard conditions, with a simple heatsink, maybe a fan. And they go down from there. Swap out the cheapo heatsink, use thermal paste, and that cpu can probably run at a higher speed.
For example, almost all celeron 366es were easily capable of 550, with minor amounts of extra cooling. If they didn't need the extra cooling, they'd have been sold as 433s or 466es.
So you can either spend the extra money, and be safe, or save a few bucks and tinker. No guarantees, but that's what it's about.
For gamers this is great. For everyone else running real world business applications OC is a tragic waste of time & money. If your job depends on keeping things running OC is too risky. If you have a few lab machines - fine; experiment. But in the REAL WORLD you're better off spending the money on faster disk or even SSD . Rebuilding my DB2 indicies just isn't going to be appreciably faster with big bad CPU's when disk performance is the throttle. For a coupla hundred bucks I'd rather get another U2W SCSI adapter, some more disks and parallel the I/O.
People like to see how far they can push things. Overclocking, Racing, Sky Diving ... etc are all things people like to do and see how far they can push the limit. People are going to find ways around they blocks these companies put their products.