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The Plusses And Perils of Overclocking
mblase writes "This C|Net article, published this morning, covers some of the advantages and many of the drawbacks involved for those who want to seriously overclock their PC hardware -- and why."
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Celeron -$100
Cooling unit -$300
The look on an OC'ers face when the blue haze of death strikes - Priceless
There's a real reason why OC'ing is done, with servers that need to be up on a 24x7 basis.
The usual scenario is that Company X lays out a budget for the IT department; and then the Company starts growing faster than expected. Of course, the IT budget isn't increased accordingly, or in a timely fashion. Servers start to get swamped, and then you're in a mad rush to try to buy and bring up some new servers. Assuming, by then, you still have the budget for them.
What I like to do is to plan my new servers with systems that I know that I can OC later on. It's nice having that extra horsepower around if I need it. And it's a LOT faster than trying to get approval for a new server.
Yes, yes, I know. If things were planned properly, and you have good management, this wouldn't be an issue. That is, unfortunately, all too rare in the business.
I've had more than one cute girl sit in my lap while I did something on the computer.
Actually, that is why i *underclock*, I mean.. why rush things?
Yeah, and with the resources you spent on free software, you could have bought ready-to-use proprietary packages. And with the resources you spent on building your own PC you could have bought a Dell. And with the resources you spent on your significant other, you could have bought...
Nope. I don't touch Win9x/ME... especially when I'm using MSVC.
It's got some bump in the trunk.
Ah! Now it makes sense.
This is what Sun Microsystems is talking about, when they're saying they're going to put chips into refrigerators and run waffle irons on Java.
--
Breakfast served all day!
Maybe you need to upgrade your OS.
Personally, my dual slocket celeron 300A's have been running smoothly at 450 for a couple years now. No crashes. Reboot for kernel upgrades a couple times a year.
two words: Omni GLH
I now know who is going to win the Darwin Award in a couple of years.
That's what I don't get. I always chuckle when I see a Geo Metro driving down the road that has been souped up with those stupid wider wheels, detailing, hydralics, custom interior, etc. For the money they spent to do that, they could have actually bought a car instead of fixing up a go-cart.
I have to admit that I really laughed at this section of the article: Physical injury is even a possibility. "You're dealing with a lot of heat," Blevins said. "I've had friends get third-degree burns working on their systems." I mean, come on! If you are taking all of these cooling precautions wouldn't it be somewhat logical the the chips might get just a little warm?
The people who buy the expensive cooling gear are the nuts - the rest of us are just cheap and like getting something for nothing (or $15 for a better fan/heat sink combo like the Golden Orb and a little silicon grease).
Amen - some people get so up tight about overclocking. They don't take the time to read about moderate overclocking (ie pushing a Celeron CPU from a 66Mhz FSB to a 100Mhz FSB - all your components like PCI bus still at regular specifications except your cpu)... Instead they focus on the people who spend hundreds of dollars because they enjoy the hobby and of course the "effects of overclocking" which boil down to a little extra heat in reality. Nobody likes to have an unstable system. You can easily have a stable system if you go with the flow, keep the buses within reasonable specs (I stay at spec), and don't try to push a CPU that can't do it. If a CPU works for a large percentage of people (see the db at overclockers.com) and yours doesn't - tough shit, go buy another...
oh, sure. 600 mhz, eh? being that you'd need either the highest quality ram at the time (you said "a few years ago"), which was pc100, you'd be not only overclocking your system bus to 133 mhz (at the celery 300's 4.5x multiplier), you'd also be overclocking your ram to that point. and a few years ago, most motherboards were LUCKY to get near a 121 Mhz bus, let alone 133 Mhz. what did you use to cool this chip that was overclocked 200 percent? what kind of motherboard did you use? personally, I have a dual celeron 366 setup overclocked to 550 Mhz each on an Abit BP6 motherboard, and it's been rock solid (after a bios update or two) on my linux mandrake system for almost a year and a half. if you're going to post something to incite conversation, at least get your facts straight. I'd respect a well-informed liar much more than someone who spouts off with half-true information.
actually, yeah. go get yourself a Mini SuperOrb. you should be able to fit that one the BP6. I did. it's small enough in diameter to fit in the restricted area on that wonderful mobo, but made my previously semi-stable dual celeron 366 setup rock solid.
:)
www.bp6.com has a bunch of info on this board.
are you stoned?
usually, the cpu is multiplier locked, so the only way to increase the clock speed is to overclock the system bus, which overclocks the bus speed, ram speed, and usually overclocks anything that's running on the PCI slots.
PCI slots are usually running at a divider of the bus speed, i.e. if the system bus is 100 Mhz, then the divider is 2/3, which keeps the bus speed at 66 Mhz. however, anything other than 66, 100, or 133 Mhz dividers are not supported, and most mobo's will support 1 Mhz increments, which will overclock everything else.
many new athlons and durons aren't multiplier locked, so you can do a multiplier increase to knock up the cpu speed, but most mobos (especially the Abit KT7) will still allow 1 Mhz incremental increases in the bus speed for that extra increase.
For the record, I've also got an '80 caprice and a '75 El Camino that both have 400+ HP 350s, and a full-size truck with a moderate 454, so I don't really qualify as a rice boy (they've all got steel wheels and no more than 2-color paint jobs) yet... :)
Yeah, but the camaros wouldn't even start to approach the 25MPG my caprice was getting... :) I didn't build it to be a balls-out racing machine, I built it to be relatively cheap. Besides that, yencos were almost all rats (the chevelles and the camaros). I'll ignore the part about "any RS", 'cause I know darn well that most of them weren't factory rated at 1HP/cid or better... Not that I wouldn't trade my caprice for a first generation camaro (or even better, a '70 LS6 anything) in a heartbeat despite that. ;)
It's OK though, the cars I've had and sold through the years tend to get faster and faster as time goes by too. :)
Uhhh.... No.
It's not office loading faster, it's framerates so fast you can blast your opponents into oblivion before they even see you coming. There's definitely some adrenaline there.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Is it really a good idea to underclock a system? I would think that you would want to keep your bus running at the recommended speed for the rest of your hardware... maybe I'm wrong...
An electrician where I work cautioned me about excessive electromagnetic radiation emissions from an overclocked cpu, and I consider him a far more reliable source than a smug reply from a nobody.
Electromagnetic radiation (EMR) is omnipresent - it's in your home, car and workplace - and has been linked to many of our modern day illnesses, including cancer. Considering up to 2 milligauss continual radiation exposure per hour is regarded as safe, and a computer monitor alone generates circa 28 milligauss per hour, shouldn't this be a cause for concern? This isn't taking into account photocopy machines, vehicles or cordless/mobile phones that you may have come in contact with either. If you need links to familiarize yourself with EMR, try google.com - I found plenty.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Granted, we're exposed to small doses of it anyway everytime we use the computer, sleep beside our digital alarm clock, or use any electrical appliance for that matter - but an overclocked cpu/mainboard is said to be at near dangerous levels.
Is this true?
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
I ran into this. I had a pair of 366 Celerons on a BP-6, payed a bit extra to get pre-tested at 550 chips (before Celerons were availble at 550) and they ran great for months. No problems. Then I tried to run a render on them (actually they were part of a mosix cluster that I ran the render on) and every singe time they would crash the render process. Dropped them back to stock 366 and they ran fine. The render process obviously hit a slow timing path that normal operation didn't.
AFAIK noone has released a comprehensive stress test program that attempts to stress all possible timeing paths in an inplace CPU, which is what you would have to do, since OCers don't have the timeing info worked out by the engineers.
Methinks perhaps you have an interesting view of supply and demand.
The huge surcharge on the latest technology is not some just some nice little premium the semiconductor manufacturer sticks on to recoup development costs. The way you talk about it, it sounds like you're saying the company adds this surcharge, and then, once they've gotten back their money for developing the high end part, they'll kindly drop the price, because they're nice folks, after all.
The price of the part reflects what the market will bear, assuming there is reasonable competition. In the x86 processor market, this wasn't the case on high end parts until fairly recently, and as a result, those high end Xeon parts and the like routinely sold at *massive* profit margins.
With reasonable competition, we fall back into the supply/demand relationship nicely. OCing only reinforces this natural market condition; by running a chip at a faster speed grade than it is rated" you lower the supply curve slightly and push down prices.
I think most OC'ing is pointless; when there's reasonable competition in the market, chips do tend to get sold at the grade at which they are reliable for normal use. There are exceptions, though, like Intel's Celeron 300A. The 300A was an attempt by Intel to artifically split the market to extract more profit from it; OC'ers actually help defeat this corporate market manipulation.
The question is one of morals. Myself, I have no particular problem with it. But many people may rightly regard overclocking as cheating, with some good reason. I am happy to admit that I am a cheater - I don't give a shit.
I'm surprised this is even comes up as an issue. When you buy a chip, you buy a piece of hardware. You've no moral obligation back to the company to use it as they intended or desire. You bought it, you can use it as you like; if they're depending on you not OC'ing so they'll get more money, you're under no obligation, legal, moral, or otherwise, to support that.
Now resellers who OC systems without full disclosure to their customers are a whole different beast.
This same article was posted at ZDNet News yesterday @ 4:44am. It's funny that David Becker sells the story to ZDNet the day before it runs in his own paper.
Try using a line break or paragraph tag; it makes things so much easier to read. I read the first line and my eyes went out of focus. Check out this UseIt.com article for more info and reasons why.
Why would overclocking be immoral? If I buy something, I should be able to [ab]use it however the hell I please.
The fans look very big! Did you have any trouble fittinng them on BP6?
with the stock cpu fan that came with mobo my temeratures are
idle : cpu ~35'c , system ~40'c
busy : cpu ~55'c , system ~58'c
So do I need a fan, or these are okay?
thanks in advance
LL
Yeah, yeah, I know. I am one of those people who have a Bp6 (2xcel 500). At this point I am running at the default speed. I would however like to try OCing some time in the future.
Can anyone suggest a good CPU fan
- that doesn't cost a fortune
- fits on bp6
- works right out of box, doesn't need any milling or modifications
I have been bp6.com and nothing much there.
linuxlover
A surefire way to get an article submitted is to send it in multiple times over the span of a week...eventually someone screws up.
;).
What's really fun is submitting an article, getting it posted, and then re-submitting it until you get a duplicate posted (not that i've ever done it
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
"It's kind of like buying a ford Focus, and spend a lot of money and time souping up the engine"
And you've never seen a Honda Civic that had a modified exhaust, rear spolier, modified front air dam, turbo-charger, nitrous...
Its the exact same mind set. People don't want to buy fast, they want to buy something that they can make fast. Its a personal accomplishment that way. Anyone can buy a fast car, how many people can make a slow one fast? Anyone can buy a fast processor, how many people can make a slow one fast?
Back in Nov 99 when I ordered 2 celys 366 for $35 each, I also ordered two of the Alpha 7HO fans from http://www.3dfxcool.com/alpha7ho.htm for around $30 a piece.
You can't go wrong with these fans !
If you need bios settings to O/C your celys, post a follow up here.
> The fans look very big! Did you have any trouble fittinng them on BP6?
The fitting was a little tight, but it wasn't any trouble getting them to fit.
The idle temps sound about right.
Your busy temp is TOO HIGH !!! You can check your temp here:
http://bp6.gamesquad.net/cooling/
I didn't cool the BX chipset, but you might want to. You can find instructions at:
http://bp6.gamesquad.net/bxcool.phtml
This space intentional filled with a useless sentence.
whatever...yet another article on overclocking. but I'll take more CPU's and better components over a faster CPU any day.
I've had my Dual 466 Celeron for over a year and a half now, and it's absolutely fantastic, and rock-solid stable. Sure, I've upgraded the RAM over that time from 128MB to 512, but through it all I've felt no need to upgrade the processor(s)
The motherboard recently went south on me and I had to replace it. I got looking around and noticed that Asus now has a dual PIII board for ~$230CDN. I ended up just RMAing this board, but I know when I do eventually need to upgrade there's no WAY I'll be going back to a single processor board.
If you're running Linux, FreeBSD or Win2k (or even BeOS) an SMP system makes a world of difference under heavy load. Recompiling? Encoding MP3's? Running VMWare? These operations are sped up very noticeably.
For people looking for a new machine: Save your precious dollars on the fastest processor. Fill up on RAM, get a good video card, and get an SMP board. I'd rather have 2 800MHz chips than a 1.6GHz any day of the week.
AMD: I'd rather get an SMP chipset out of you than Yet Another "Fastest" Processor. I'd much rather own a Duron or Athalon than a crappy Celeron or PIII, but I'd take an SMP Celeron over a single Duron..
this will not work for arbitrary CPUs - always read the data sheets .... some CPUs use internal dynamic nodes in things like carry chains .... and should be spec'd with a lowest freq as well as a fastest
You have to realize that it's not that simple - one thing I didn't stress as much as I should of was that often the actualy worst case paths on a chip are not the ones you think of, or expect, or even what your tools tell you about - maybe there's a noise issue at higher frequencies (that's happened to me), inductive coupling on some long wires etc etc and worse yet in places like datapaths they may be sensitive to data patterns (maybe stressing the power/gnd grid) - this means combinatorial explosions on top of combinatorial explosions.
Another thing I didn't point out was all thge different reasons for timing failures - you can effects like the position of the die on the wafer, the day of the week the wafer started the fab (I kid you not), etc etc ..... the result after all this stuff is a statistical mess - die come in all within a bell curvish sort of range you have to work to position the curve so that you can meet your revenue targets - both by yield and then by binning - pushing the yield up to get the volume at the low end (ie moving the peak of the curve so that vast majority of the parts at least yield your slower parts) may mean you make too many fast ones - it's all deeply intertwingled
the plastic package burst into flames ....
One computer maker worked with AMD to produce a cyrogenicly cooled K7 computer. AMD even made a special version of the cpu certified to overclock at the lowered case temperture. (Intel would NEVER do that!). Natch'ly this was a more expensive cpu, but it allowed the sale of a computer nearly twice as fast as the nearest available K7 powered computer. Reminds of the Cray's with their liquid nitrogen cooling system.
Chip manufacturers can't possibly test all their chips to find the absolute max speed they will run at, that would take way too long. So they product chips in mass quantity and the speed they are labeled as is what they are guaranteed to run correctly at. If it doesn't run at that speed you can take it back. If it runs 100MHZ faster than what it is rated at then you just got a freebie.
That's how every industry works, products are guaranteed to do so much. If you can squeeze more power/life/sexual pleasure out of that product then good for you.
Like cars. When you buy a car it is under warranty for a certain time. It is also rated at certain mpg/hp etc. If you can tweak it and make it faster, more economic, etc., then good for you, but you're tweaking the final product beyond it's specifications and it's no longer under warranty.
This is all as it should be. Stop making up complaints out of thin air. Go do something productive, write some code, donate money to the EFF, but quit being a whiny little bitch.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
At which time you can overclock it and get still more value.
Sigs are awesome huh?
heh, You have got to be a troll.. but I'll bite.
cel300a oc'd to 450mhz without a problem. What were you thinking running it at 600? You weren't...
Sigs are awesome huh?
I can't wait till the same people can tool on personal space entry vehicles.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
I disagree.
Lets say Ford starts putting the same engine in all of their cars.
In the faster cars they run all 8 cylinders, but in the slower ones they pull the spark plug wires off a few of them.
Maybe they dont even bother to put tapped mounting holes in the block for the spark plugs on those cylinders so enterprising consumers won't go in there and hook the remaining cylinders up.
Should that be illegal? Why?
If you dont want to buy a 4 cylinder that really could have been an 8 cylinder, don't buy it.
Sweet. I'd love to underclock a few of my boxes at home, or better yet, get stuff that runs at low power and heat to begin with. I've been looking around at 'quiet PC' products and info, and a lot of that has low power reqs.
What I'd _really_ love is a low power (and rugged!) laptop. Maybe something like the Fujitsu LXS, except with a magnesium or titanium case. The one they have looks way too flimsy. I have a toshiba sat. pro now that is cracking and falling apart, and I don't like that. It also gets way too hot!
Where are the cool running, rugged laptops, and cool running, quiet workstations?
They may be lying about the capabilities of their products, but there's no way in hell that you'll get them on fraud for telling you their products aren't as good as they really are. If the lie were in the other direction, it might be an issue, but with processors that's never the case (except maybe with the p4, but we see where that went...). This whole discussion reminds me a lot of the pentium 90/100 issue back when they first came out. The two chips were exactly the same as far as design and manufacturing go, but the 90s didn't pass all the tests that the 100s were forced to. Would you prefer them to market them as "Pentiums that should work at 100MHz but we can only get them to reliably function slower" or "Pentiums that definitely work at 90MHz"?
This is a self-referential sig
Note that if you overclock your CPU, bus speed, memory bandwith, graphics card performance, network speed and harddisk perfomance are still unchanged.
Only if you overclock using strictly the multiplier. Typically, one also increases bus speed so that will increase performance in all areas.
If you need to ask, you wouldn't understand.
Ratty
I've always Oc'ed my comps.If you can go faster then why not ? I OC'ed my 486 Dx2 66 to 80 MHz,486 dx5 133 to 160 MHz,pentium 100 to 120 MHz,pentium 2 350 to 392 MHz,my Celeron 300 to 450 MHz, dual celeron 333 to dual 480 MHz and right now my P3 700 is at 952 MHz and still climbing.I just can't help it. :-)
I also tuned my car from 125 hp to 145 hp..Guess I'm addicted to speed
/ce
The current generation of graphics boards are essentially overclocked already; current NVidia products have heat sinks on the RAM. The current generation of Pentium IIIs are essentially overclocked already; current Intel products have heat sinks on the core.
Hot rodder ... or rice-boy? Poseurs that are theorizing about every ounce of extra power when they'd be better off saving their cash and buying a better car? That's why you get the 5" coffee-can exhaust tip. Or the 20" high spoiler that makes the poor car look like a shopping cart? Or the cheesy blue headlights?
http://www.riceboypage.com/http://www.beaterz.com/
http://www.beaterz.com/
Bad analogy. People do it all the time. How many rice burners do you see on the street? Bunch of idiots buy an econobox and spend 10 large suping it up so they can impress their frinds. Gotta wonder what makes some people tick...
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
I agree. My PC is no Boss, but it doesn't mean I didn't have fun tweaking it. Somewhere above, a person mentioned it not being the same as a 400Hp etc etc....Well no shit. I don't expect a big adrenaline rush from the damn thing, or an easy score...I do it for the satisfaction that I made something more than the manufacturers intended. Like most good things in life, it's the sense of accomplishment that does it for me.
-Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
the t-bird is under 200 now, but was it when the 300a's were under 100? I didn't think so. My 300a's could run 450/500 stable when a P2 450 was about as much as I paid for both the cpu and mb. In years of over clocking I've spent maybe 40 bucks. Granted, some folks may not have easy access to old case/PSU fans, but those are 3 bucks a pop at a computer show anyway....
-Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Yeah, I can wait for the next best thing, and pay twice as much (or more) for it. I overclock partially because I save considerable money (a few hundred bucks) every machine I build. Unstable???? Not if you do it right.
-Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
I agree, but in the back of my mind, a little voice says "now, how fast would optimized code be if I OC'ed?"
-Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
This one is easy guys..... for example, i have a AMD Duron 600 that I have clocked to 1050 mhz. The chip was $60 and only has a $20 hsf installed. The system it is in has been running stable for some 64 days now with no problems. This is a much cheaper alternative to buying a retail cpu.
The story, not overclocking. Just in case any of you bad children didn't get the point that overclocking is BAD, consider this: Physical injury is even a possibility. "You're dealing with a lot of heat," Blevins said. "I've had friends get third-degree burns working on their systems." Remember, what's bad for Intel is bad for America. BTW, a friend of mine bought a chip to change the maximum speed in his Volkswagen. He's overclocking his car.
...and at the end of the day, what do you have? A stock Honda Prelude, exactly like millions of others on the road. People have already pointed out the obvious fact (one which you strangely seem to miss) that people modify inexpensive cars because they enjoy it, but I admire the rice burners for their originality. These people turn a mass produced product into a totally original statement about themselves. Sure, some ricy Honda Civic might look silly to some with an enormous wing and wheels that stick out from the car, but there's only one like it. The owner's friends can recognize his car from a several blocks away. Those cars are works of art. Your prelude is just another lump of metal stamped out of the factory. I doubt they're crushed when you zoom away from them at a traffic light. After all, there's millions of boring consumers just like you.
I had a Celeron 400 oc'd to 450 for a year or so. Not much of a performance increase, I know, but it was something. The only way to do it was to bump the bus speed up from 66 MHz to 75 MHz. This also increased the PCI bus speed from 33 MHz to 37.5 MHz.
I use my PC as a digital audio workstation in my home studio. It worked great for a while, but then I installed a PCI SCSI card and started using my USB port with a MIDI patchbay (why didn't anyone ever tell me that USB uses CPU time?). Suddenly I would get tons of dropouts when I tried to use MIDI while simulataneously recording audio to a SCSI drive, not to mention an occasional lock-up.
I was getting pretty fed up with that behavior, so I stopped overclocking by dropping the bus speed back down to 66 MHz, and now everything works great. I haven't had a dropout or lockup since.
I did alot of what would be considered overclocking mods on my computer just to get the processor temp down to what seemed reasonable and safe. I got a super sized heatsink for my processor and lots of case fans. I think that the knowledge in cooling that overclockers discovered will be very useful as the power dissipation of modern chips increases
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
There is also the problem of attenuation. I'm no electrical engineer, but I recall that whenever a digital signal line changes state, there is a wobble (it doesn't flick immediately). This is something to do with the fourier series.
If this wobble is big enough, and the bits are being read too fast, the following bit can be read during a dip in the wobble and be misinterpretted as the wrong value. (this was, I believe, the original limiting factor in cpus, before heat).
There is no such chip as a 550 EB, and if it were, it would normally run at 133 MHz. What you have should be a coppermine 550 B, which has a 100 MHz FSB but has an internal cache running at the same speed as the processor. By pushing it to 133 MHz FSB you practically have a 733 EB (maybe exactly the same chip - I don't know about the latencies).
.18 micron they don't get as hot as the previous ones.
Also, if both boards are running at 133 FSB, how come you get 825 MHz??? (5.5 * 133 != 825)
PS: I have the same system at home (550 B overclocked to 5.5*133=733). Most P3 550 B's are shipped with a better-than-average fan, and since they are
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
Why can't we moderate stories?
Because you logged onto the wrong web site. Nest time, instead of typing slashdot.org into your browser, try www.kuro5hin.org instead. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to moderate stories.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
are cheaper than crack.
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Somehow I just can't equate the chest-slamming force of flooring a well-tuned engine and taking off into the distance with over 400 horses under your seat with making Office load faster.
"OH YEAH!!! Got it down to ***TEN*** seconds!!! WAAAAHOOOOO!!!!! OH YEAHH!!! THAT'S THE WAY TO WORK IT, UH HUH, UH HUH, HMMMM YEAH!!!"
No, sorry, just doesn't do it for me.
Advantages: You become a hardware pimp and become awed for going to 1 GHz with that liquid nitro-cooled Celery 766 your mom got you at Best Buy.
.... why, again?
Disadvantages: You go too far and are laughed at like a wannabe hardware monkey. And you're out a Celery.
And I care because
In general the cooling gear and be reused for your next OCing adventure, but the point does stand for the sake of check-out-savings. you spend more the first time and, if you're lucky and a good OCer, you save in the end. But the number of failures tends to even it all out into a worthless adventure of tweaking that spawns very odd problems over constant usage of bad chips.
All in all, it's rarely worth it; just get the higher-rated chip and bite the cash hit.
It's not a conspiracy, Slashdotter. No big corp is out to get you. It's a fact that some chips really are rated faster than others due to design and process.
That the process has gotten better and there's some overflow from the higher ends is another matter entirely, but it's really just a holdover from the days when it mattered.
Can think of one: So I can brag about 'my toaster connected to Internet'. Any other takes?
I do agree in part. Some code is really written in a half assed manner. If optimized they could make better use of a slower machines processor. But there are many applications that need raw processing power. OLTP programs are some big ones that come to mind. When a client wants his data, he wants it now. Doesn't want to be waiting more than a few seconds. Sometimes you have to let that 3Ghz processor site idle 90% of the time just to keep your clients happy.
Another thing I've noticed is that with such high amounts of processing power, coders no longer pay as much attention to what they are using. They are all trying to develop apps that the customer wants in a quick manner.
High speed and highly optimized code, Now that's a combination.
There are times when the only thing you can do to increase performance is to overclock. Take PDA's for example. I have a Palm IIIx. Coolest thing since canned ham (not really). But anyways, it runs normally at 16mhz I believe. Through other individuals slick palm hacking. There is now software to overclock your palm pilots. My palm runs at a slick 29mhz. Through all the other optimizations it runs a ful 260% better than 'stock.' I've heard some people get their's all the way to 46mhz. Now that is smoking. As far as I know this is the only reliable way to increase the performance on your Palm Pilots.
So there you go, a practical OC'ing situation.
I overclocked my Athlon and have had little problems. Sometimes it takes a second boot for it to power up. But nothing serious. My only concerns are heat and what it may affect other than just the processor. I fried a power supply once from an overheated condition from the processor. I'm only running moderatly faster than 'stock' 700mhz (7x100) to 800mhz (8x100) it seems to run reliable with only a single fan on my Athlon. Besides, I don't want to reduce the life of my processor by soaking it with heat.
Useful data? The real question is how fast can a 100 MHz (or any speed CPU) can run a denial of service attack. :)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
My compilations tend to be relatively quick (15 - 30 seconds or so) - I work on small sub-components, then once I've unit tested them, I submit them to the group for integration into the main engine. That compile tends to take a bit longer, but I don't have to do that :)
Also, a breakdown of my coding time is:
98% frustration (bang head against monitor)
1.5% inspiration ("OH MY GOD I was so STUPID! How could I have missed that?!?!?!)
0.5% waiting for compiles
:)
I agree. Business-critical (or Anything-critical) machines should NEVER be overclocked.
:) Nothing important is lost.
:) No matter how fast my CPU is, I can't think or type any quicker...
I overclock my home machine (Thunderbird 800, OC'd to 935 (8.5 * 110mhz), with PC100 SDRAM OC'd to 147mhz (HCLK+PCICLK = 110+37)) but that's my HOME system, used for gaming, balancing the checkbook, hobbyist coding (currently I'm working on a team writing a WWI flightsim) etc. NOTHING business-critical.
I would NEVER overclock my work box. That's a good way to end up unemployed!
"How is that module coming? You have an 8:00 am Friday deadline you know"
"Uh boss... I won't be able to make that deadline because I am busy trying to put out the fire on my CPU."
My wife has her own computer, and I have everything important backed up (and copied onto her machine) so if mine dies, I just can't play any games for a while until I get it fixed
Stability is FAR more important than speed in today's computing environment. Heck, the bottleneck really isn't processor speed anymore anyway - it's 'net connection speed, hard drive access speed, memory speed, etc. I've noticed my 135mhz overclock has resulted in about 10% improvement in benchmarks, just a couple FPS improvement in the games I play, and has a ZERO speed improvement in my coding speed
I guess you haven't heard of overclocking graphics cards. There are web pages devoted to it. Here are a few:
How to OC your video card
and
Another good one
and
Heatsinks for your video card
and
What to look for in an Overclockable video card Also, many times, overclocking involves increasing bus speed, ala 66Mhz to 100Mhz, etc. The fact that you said that alone tells me you don't know very much about overclocking. You might want to read up on the various facets of overclocking, you might look at your computer in a totally different way.
P.S. Why is it ok for people to perform a software upgrade to get a 33Mhz IDE bus to run at 66Mhz (vendor approved, yes I am talking about the BP6 bios upgrades) but its not ok for people to change a setting or two in their bios? I bet all the people bitching about overclockers would download and install a patch to get more performance out of their computers if it came from a vendor but they are reluctent to try something on their own.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Haven't we read this before? I mean, haven't we read this VERY SAME ARTICLE before?
"[insert name here]is one of a growing number of people known as 'overclockers'.."
"After awhile, however, some overclockers begin to pursue speed for speed's sake."
I think they have a group of contacts they keep in a file cabinet somewhere called "Filler". "Look under O, Al. That's for overclocking! Crazy kids!"
I shouldn't complain though, at least it's better than hearing about the govt writing a brief on the DMCA for the MPAA.
Low rider != hydraulics
This sig is xenon coated, and will glow red when in the presence of aliens
I call bullshit.
This sig is xenon coated, and will glow red when in the presence of aliens
Why would the record industry care about DVDs? ;)
This sig is xenon coated, and will glow red when in the presence of aliens
Dumbing down technical content for the clueless is on thing, but actual misinformation is another. The article says:
An "electrically charged heat sink." Is that hilarious or what?
What's bad is if he ate it afterwards to compensate for malnutrition from being in the shop too long.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
lowrider metros, civics & corrollas are quite common.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I totally loved my Celeron 266. Shove it into a BX board with the retail fan, and it purred at 400mhz true stable.
Nothing since has been worth it though, unfortunately... the big problem being all of the unsocket, voltage change, bios tweak, retry, get all anxious that something could explode now, dam... trying that 43mhz pci speed was a bad idea, loops.
Unless you really love overclocking, or have found that it improves your apparent penis size, its not worth it if you value your time about 25 cents/hour.
I've got my 566 Celeron running at 935Mhz... Has been for 7 months... I will definately want a new processor long before it burns out. Plus, the cooling on it cost me about $35. Runs pretty cool too. -Ben
could be its using clever convection currents to drag the air in the bottom and push it out the top without a fan (in essence the heat of the CPU is the fan.. but not a very noisy one).
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Just a stupid question, but if I poured a few drops of liquid oxygen over a superconducting magnet, would it float in mid air?
I've seen it done with a really big conventional magnet. It was pretty cool, let me tell you.
I wasn't sure if plain water would soak up enough heat or not in the computer sense.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
I had a cyrix 686 CPU once (twice). Second degree burn via touching the heatsink took approximately 0.5 seconds.
it doesnt have to be too long, or neccessarily too stupid to get burned.
---
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
My first thought is to agree with you, and say "Why yessir, I did!" but I stopped and thought about it for a while. I actually escaped more cleanly than most did.
In fact, all things considered, I think I made out like a bandit with them. I had a Cyrix 100 and a Cyrix 200. Other than heat issues, I never *really* had a problem with them.
Sure they ran hot. VERY hot. But they ran... and they could count too. *grin* Seriously though, I replaced the cpu fans and heat sinks with something that cut the mustard a little better, and never had a problem with them. Ran them for the better part of three years, and then gave them to other people, whom to the best of my knowledge are still running them. How on earth could I complain about that?
---
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
I agree with you. CNet probably has about as much overclocking experience as it took to write that article. There are countless sites out there that slashdot could have chosen a better article from, sites that have been featuring overclocking prominently for nearly 4 years now.
Ive been overclocking since the adjustable asus t2p4 board came out in late 96 and I have to say Im just dissapointed by the shallow approach of the CNet article. How come no one ever addresses the issue of fraud regarding chips? Intel has a long and proud history of gouging for its processors and then remarking them as low-speed chips to fill demand. Overclocking as it originally started wasnt even overclocking- it was just people changing the speed back to what it was when it left the factory. The old celeron 266s were just p2-400s with no cache and a single pin disabled off-chip so the motherboard would run it at a slower speed. They cost about the same to manufacture, but the p2 cost nearly 8 time more to buy.
The best newspaper in the USA: the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
The best newspaper in the USA: the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
I've been holding out for a new Mobo/proc combo until there is a reliable SMP Socket A board out. Until then I will stick with my old K6-2 400mhz. Grabbing my Ankles for Intel just doesn't do it for me.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
You are dealing with a lot of power. A short circuit can melt metal quite easily in a explosive way.
Scientia est Potentia
I've hotrodded a station wagon before. Most people never expect a 1978 Dodge diplomat wagon to outaccelerate a mustang.. but oh well.
--
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
You even admit you don't understand my comment - why you feel able to criticise it I don't know.
Go away, little troll.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
But I gotta tell you the look on people's faces when you tell them you have an 8 stage cooling system manufactured out of assorted car radiators, oil coolers and an old refigerator hooked up to the heasink on your computer is well worth the effort.
In reality, the More Insane Cooling Setup is a very close analogy to the old "My dick is bigger than your dick" game.
And, of course, your /. reading friends all grin from ear to ear while they ask you, "Can you imagine a Beowolf cluster of those?!"
/tma
----
Not one of your better efforts, troll-wise. You completely forgot to mention God in it. I mean, who among the slashbots knows who Adam Smith is? Now, if you had somehow quoted something from Leviticus saying "And let Him smite down those who dare OC a FSB" that would have been good.
The question is one of morals? It's not cheating (like speeding) OC-ing is just disregarding the manufacturer's recommended range. You might as well say people shouldn't rev their cars more than 3000 rpm because it's cheating.
Damn, and I want to mod down trolls.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
Over clocking is a little over rated, IMHO, but I can see the practical applications, regarding stress testing, and just plain fun of it all... I do think that it's pretty cheesy that CPU manufacturers try to put a stop to it. It's not hurting them any, and if products like the P4, were worth the ungodly amount of money that Intel wants, then maby less people would overclock.
Uh, my Duron 800 ($80) runs just fine at 1GHz with a $25 fan, in my old gateway p200 tower with a 300W power supply. Thermal paste is good. :P
10 hours to encode half an hour of MPEG-2 video (1000 MHz).
vs.
13 hours to encode half an hour of MPEG-2 video (850 MHz).
You start needing to encode 2 hours of video and it's a 12 hour difference. You start doing MPEG-2 work as a part-time job, and you're talking about saving days or even weeks over the course of a month. What's a week's wages worth to you? That extra few MHz can matter, so you buy what you can afford and then you get what you can out of it.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
lol.. funny, and a nice tag line. (read caps backwards you ninnies..)
Example: I recently bought a new computer for doing computer animation with (3d programs like maya are smp aware)
Looking at prices I could almost get 2 pIII 800's for the price i could get a 933.
so I got the abit vp6 and bought 2 pIII 800's to put on it, then i thought about overclocking (i have nice big heat sinks and big fans) i am now running a dual PIII 956 because of overclocking
-------
Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
-------
Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
Physical injury is even a possibility. "You're dealing with a lot of heat," Blevins said. "I've had friends get third-degree burns working on their systems."
First degree burns, I can understand (I've barely gotten some once or twice) Second degree (blisters), I imagine are within the realm of possibility if you're stupid enough to touch something for too long. But third-degree burns? This is starting to sound like anti-drug propaganda! I can't believe they closed the article with that tripe!
However, six months later my friend overclocked a Pentium 75 to 90 MHz, and ran the Q1 demo loop for six hours. Not bad.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
"And for what? 50 mhz? maybe 75?" I'm running a P111 550 EB @ 825 mhz - and have been for about a year. That's a 275 mhz increase - definitely worth it. I have another machine, same chip, running @ 733; not quite the same gain (183), but still worth it. Both have Abit mobos running 133 FSB and PC133 RAM. No special cooling - oem heatsinks, and an extra case fan. And both are solid as a rock, at their respective speeds. I bought these right around the time when Intel released the 733 chips. I have the feeling that these might have been borderline 733s... but failed a few tests. However, if I hadn't overclocked them (by raising the FSB and RAM speeds) I'd NEVER HAVE KNOWN. And that's the real point: just what level of performance is your chip capable of? Hell, maybe these *are* 733s that were mislabelled! The bottom line is that if I see a significant performance gain, and zero stability loss, I'd be a fool not to take it.
Thats not always true... Right now I have a Duron 750 running at 959..... This is over 100 MHZ faster than any retail Duron available... and I am only using a nice cooling fan that I paid 25 bucks for....
Taxes and Lazy People are best friends.
Since 1Ghz frequencies are touching the microwave area of the EMR spectrum.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
You can overclock more then just CPU's.. .5x, raising the bus freq up 5Mhz, or adjusting any other parameters in your system bios? If it takes you 10 minutes and you get a performance increase why not do it?
I had a Yamaha 200t (2x6 CDR), with a few modifications and a reflash of the bios, its now a Yamaha 400t (4x6 CDR).
It has been working fine at 4x for at least 500 CD burns. About a 100 on my Intel P133 overclocked to a P150 (75x2, CPU multiplier is clocklocked at 2) and the rest on my K6-2/400 overclocked to a K6-2/450 (110x4)
You can "overclock" many other CDR's also.
My theory is if its free, go for it..
I consider it fine tuning, just as you fine tune your proxy settings, your DB's, network settings, upgrade your kernel for better support, etc.. How is this any different then moving a CPU multiplier setting up an extra
Overclocking is very well documented. You will find far more web pages that describe CPU overclocking then you'll find on "fine tuning" something like Samba.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Overclocking always reminds me of the old Dilbert strip when Dogbert runs a course for people with no common sense. Among them was Clem, the auto mechanic who thought that he got struck by lightning every time he smoked a cigar while working on car engines--and was amazed at the coincidence.
No, I know that people do it all of the time. It's stupid. I totally agree. Like sacherjj, I also get a good laugh out of the souped up tin cans out there.
Every now and then, I try to do some good. If I can get just one of those people's brains going, it's all worth it. So, I'll blow them away at a stoplight with my factory stock Honda Prelude.
Overclocking is the halmark to owning a pc... but my friend tells me about chip designing... he says that if you own a p3 1000 it was probably made in the same batch of processors that some came out 933, 1100... and so they just round off the numbers and sell them to the most close mean... (933+/- 10mhz... and so on...) So what I gather from that is that it's not always good to overclock because you might already be pushing it with it's labeled clock speed.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
I first bought the Celeron A 300 a few years ago. It was touted at the "easily overclocked" chip. I ran it at 600Mhz for a few weeks, but it would crash all of the time. For someone that runs Linux as a primary OS, that is not good at all. Everytime I would reboot, I would hope that it would pass fcsk. Spend the extra couple of bucks if it is that important to have a CPU that fast. I will stick to slow but stable.
---> suck it
The main advantage of overclocking in many cases is the increased front-side bus speed. With an increased FSB speed, the CPU spends less time waiting for instructions, and for many applications, I have not seen significant additional substantial stress placed on the CPU due to overclocking while performing most activities.
However, I have often found that very CPU intensive processes will often fail mysteriously on overclocked systems particularly if this task is prolonged. I have never been able to successfully recompile a kernel on overclocked systems, though to be fair, it could probably be done with higher quality chips (AMD K6-2 were used in most instances).
Underclocking a machine may be helpful in some instances, but I wonder how useful this will be on many mission-critical machines, particularly if the computer may be coordinating lots fo data between peripherals (say, as a router). The lowering of the FSB speed could be a problem in this instance.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Wheres the fun in that?? The fun part is modifying the car. I have a Dodge Neon.. I love modifying this car.. And it'll beat a lot of the "fast" cars out there... That is the satisfying part.. What is satisfying about buying a Dodge Viper, and just blowing away everything out ther.. It's modifying your little 4-cylinder car to beat that viper. THAT'S SATISFYING.
-Robert
My celeron 300A is still chugging along at 504 with no signs of any instability.
That being said, with the price compression in the CPU market nowadays I don't think my next chip will be overclocked, it worked fine but I don't know how necessary it really is nowadays.
***I LIKE PIE***
Overclocking made far more sense before AMD grabbed hold of the market. Two years ago a Celeron 300a cost only $100(CA) and the current top of the line PII 450 cost almost $1000(CA), but the Celeron overclocked to 450MHz and actually outperformed the PII in several benchmarks. The only real risk of this type of overclock was to the CPU, and with adequate cooling mine has run for 2 years (24x7x365) without a problem. Cost of cooling = $30(CA), cost of faster chip = $900, the choice in such a case is simple.
I'm worried that you choose to say "legitimately," as if there is something untoward or illegal about running a CPU at greater than its rated speed. CPU's are sold, not licensed. If a person wishes to run his property out of spec, there's nothing not legitimate about it.
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
a AMD 450 in my Asus P5A-B and vaporized the core on the first try. I laughed and reached into the box box o' cheap ass processors started over.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
Please don't use LOX, Liquid OXygen, almost anything burn if it gets enough oxygen and heat, If your computer should catch fire, very probaly even the steel case will combust, and burn through the floor, even if the floor is concrete! Metal fire require very specialized and expensive extinguishing equipment and typical Do Not Work Well! Other liquid gasses pose significant aphyxiation hazards; You should have an escape air pack for all personnel in the room where any significant quantity of non-oxidiseing liquid gasses are used.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I hate those clowns who put baseball cards in their mufflers...they need to go out and get an American made car...
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
No, it's like buying a Ford Focus and driving it at 100 miles an hour every where you go. Coverclockers should get a Computer Science degree and learn how long a NAND takes, even with copper interconnects. Now figure out how to make a NAND go faster. You can't.
"My girlfriend always laughs during sex - no matter what she's reading." - Steve Jobs (Founder: Apple Computers)
I think you missed the point. There are many chips on the market today that are in fact underclocked by the manufacturers. Quite often a batch of chips is marked at a lower speed than what it was actually capable of by the manufacturers due to consumer demand for that clock speed (due to lower market prices for that clock speed). Instead of lowering the price of a chip due to an overabundance of that speed, the chip manufacturers modify the speed to meet a given price. The flaw in this practice is that chip prices do not accurately reflect the chip supply.
While I can see the benefits of modifying the supply to meet the demand, I think the consumer has not been given enough information to know what he or she can demand. And even with prices for processors as low as they are, I believe prices could be lower (especially for the higher speed chips).
So you overclock your 486 to a 1ghz, and your an abandon ware freak so you want to play X-COM, UFO Defense, so you have to run MOSLO on your OCed machine.....
I've seen it done on embedded industrial controllers. It was done for stability. The device had two hot swappable 68040's underclocked to 50 MHz, running identical calculations in parallel. The software was all proprietary, but it wasn't something unstable like Windows, or even Linux.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
The real problem is why chip manufacturers are selling mislabeled chips to begin with. In any other industry, that'd be considered fraud. With the chip industry, it's consdidered standard operating practice.
When you're buying a chip, you don't want to know just what the manufacturer is willing to tell you. You want to know all the details. You want to know why it is you should buy one brand and not another. You want to have the resources necessary to make intelligent and informed decisions about your purchasing behavior. That's the only way the free market works, and it's the reason why we have antitrust laws and other government influences to keep the free market lubricated.
If a company is selling you a chip and not telling you its whole story, then they're doing you a disservice. It's more than just an insult. It's an outright lie: a lie of ommission.
Companies should be required to test their chips rigorously and explicitly label them correctly as to their performance capabilities. That's the least the law can require. And until then, we should organize boycotts against mendacious chip manufacturers. That's our right as consumers and it'll help give our legal challenges more oomph and grassroots support.
Read the rest of this comment...
Wait wait wait .... there was a 4 banger I think it's called a Cosworth motor they were used in racing, ( I can't recal right now darn! ) anyway the exact type of motor was avalible from chevy in 1975 or 76, you could tune it for street all the way up to 140hp at the flywheel (that just spark plugs and small little stuff. If you were nut's you could turbo it also up to 210 hp (real strong heads and it had 4 valves. So you want to talk about a Hack. drop that into the neon and see what happens. Bet you get mid 15' without fixin' the trany or rear axel.
400 HP with a mouse is good but any rs or yenco ( giving my age there way ) chevy would leave that behind.
ONEPOINT
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Yep. I think my first long-term (more than a few months of actually owning the hardware) one was with those AMD 5x86-133's. Had the sucker running at 160, stable. It was nice, a little 486 on steroids that was about as fast as a P90. Nice at the time. I have three AMD's all oc'ed. Air cooled. K6-2 (450 to 500) K6-3 (450 to 500) and my new Tbird (1000 to 1200). I put a 1.2ghz rated heatsink/fan on my k6-3, keeps it nice 'n comfy.
C ya!
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
But, it's MY hardware. And if I oc it, and it fries, they're gonna get more of my money anyway. If not, then I won the gamble. I'm not stealing anything. It's the same thing as buying a truck with a 4.6L engine, and adding aftermarket performance parts to it, to boost the horsepower to that of the 5.4L engine. You're not stealing anything, just getting more out of what you purchased.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Ah! I just replied to another guys' post... heh... I feel the same way you do. I add parts to my truck to increase the performance, same way I add parts (well, just heatsink and fans) to my CPU to increase its performance. I tend to try to be a semi-expert in several fields... Computers, CB Radio, Trucks/Automotive. Like a Dopple-of-all-Trades.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Why? Do you have an iWhack?
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
But if you read about the serious overclockers, they're buy P4's and Thunderbirds and cranking 'em up even further than the current fastest running production chips. Sure there's computer rice boys out there, just like their street side brethren, but don't discount O/C'ing just because of some ricers. Besides, the article mentions that the $100 it took the guy to O/C his 500Mhz computer to 1Ghz well outweighed the costs of buying a PIII 1Ghz chip (at the time). He needed extra performance. Geo Metro owners don't *need* extra performance, so they would be considered ricey. Also, I'm sure the guy learned a lot about the computer's inner workings in the process of doing so.
That's a quote.. Dave Barry maybe? Jay Leno? I dunno.. my name ain't Bartlett. I've heard the hot-rodder analogy before. Non-geeks that have been around longer than Electronic Fuel Injection equate tech obsession with hot-rodding. When the non-geeks hear us talking about MHz and RAM and USB and SCSI and Linux - they feel like they're back at the garage, hearing their mechanic talk about pistons and valves and cams and headers. It's all greek to them, it's "technical", we're "opening up the machine and replacing parts", and they wouldn't know where to begin doing it on their own. As a VW fan, I can tell you there are two types of "hot-rodders" - those who restore old cars and those who "supe-up" old cars. The overclockers - theyre the ones that aren't afraid to cut a hole in the case (hood scoop) - add liquid cooling (supercharger) or fans (turbos) - swap out the CPU (engine swap) - or overclock it (bore it over). In short, they're not afraid to fuck up their PC for a little speed. Which to me sounds *exactly* like a hot-rodder.
I have always been a huge fan of overclocking, not so much for the performance aspect, but more for the challenge. Sometimes I would pile as many as 11 fans into my case, round my IDE and SCSI ribbons, and pre-chill the air blowing in. However, these people take it a little bit more seriously than me, actually submerging their computer in some -57 degree C lovin'.
Fluorinert + Liquid Nitrogen + Dry Ice + Celeron533 = 1GHz CPU at -32 degrees C.
why do I do it? It must be faster, even if I don't notice a difference. why? I'm not sure. faster=better. even the article didn't have a good reason people put aquariums in their goddamn machines. when I built my machine, I based every purchace upon whether or not it will clock well. even though the performance difference is negligable compared to me leaving everything alone. but I gained +2 geek points for my efforts.
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
Specifically referring to the TI-85, it was a much greater overclocking than what you're talking about here, because it would take a z80 running at 6MHz and increase the speed three or four times. This wasn't enough to overheat the CPU, but it was observed that at faster speeds, there was a higher error rate. It doesn't explain why this takes place, but it does make it seem that this is to be expected when overclocking a processor.
I demand a manual recount of my karma!
I've noticed my 135mhz overclock has resulted in about 10% improvement in benchmarks, just a couple FPS improvement in the games I play, and has a ZERO speed improvement in my coding speed :)
even compiling?
Paizurishitetai desu ka?
So if a K7 capable of 1000Mhz uses 49 watts at 1000Mhz, and a K7 only capable of 750Mhz uses 35 watts, don't you think the 1000Mhz part would use 35 watts if it were underclocked to 750Mhz?
I have never seen an unstable P-II 66Mhz FSB and I have seen a lot. There is no need to overclock, just "misclock" Run a celeron 400 on a BX board at 100mhz x 4 not 66mhz x 6. Never overclock a chipset the 1st thing to go is the HD contoller you endup currupting your HD and haveing to reload. At least in my experance. Just keep your system cool and dont use unstable componets.
Well I have been shown the way. Sorry, guys. My bad.
Well, shit. I'm gonna have to try that. Thanks for the update. I didn't think you could do that. It doesn't crash too often then? Crazy....
Most computers crash too frequently after being over clocked for it to be really useful. Yes it's cool and I love it, too. But it's a pain in the ass restarting my machine every couple of hours/random minutes. And for what? 50 mhz? maybe 75? Not worth it. You know it. I know it. Mind you, the coolness factor of playing with it. Now if we could overclock an extra 300ish mhz. That would have my attention......
I ran it at 450 Mhz with the Intel fan. The only extra expense? I had to buy a Abit motherboard (BH6) and PC100 memory. Both were ~$35 more TOTAL than PC66 and a 440LX board
This summer, I took that same board and got a Celeron 566 chip from Ebay for $145 shipped. With the slocket, heatsink/fan, and thermal grease that came with the processor(all for $145), I use that SAME board that housed my Celeron 300 and the same RAM and now run at 850 Mhz.
The advantages to this route?
I stayed at a 100 Mhz system bus, meaning all my PCI cards stayed at 33 mhz, which means stability as thats the PCI spec.
This was much cheaper than a P2 (for the 300) and P3 (for the 566) and much faster.
Your mileage may vary, but I have had nothing but good to say about the Celeron line (overclocked of course!)
Whether He be the Son of God, I know not, but this I know: whereas I was blind, now I see.
>Hey You are wrong here. If you overclock by upping the bus
>speed the Graphics card, and mem bandwidth will increase as well.
If you do that, yes. But the PCI bus doesn't stretch very far, and often PCI devices (especially network cards and videocards, iirc) might stop functioning. You also run the risk of blowing up other parts than 'just' your CPU. (For example, your memory)
>You can saturate a T1 with a 100mhz CPU. So that is not really an argument for OC or not.
Yes, but T1 is only 1.5mbit, so that's saturated pretty easily. If you were suggesting that such a computer could saturate a fast connection (such as 100mbit ethernet) then you would be right, but I was actually talking about useful data.
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Wow you're brilliant. Why do you even post?
No, you're not the only one. It was absolute fluff. The essence of the art. was as though oc'ing were some mysterious, dangerous, sport of kings or something. Which may very well be the case as I suspect the author was trying to generate some excitment for this weak peice of crap. The article, should it have been written at all, might have well consisted only of links to the sites you mention above. Thats It. Who needs this? Also, I'm a little surprised at the negative responses on oc-ing here on Slashdot. OC-ing isn't something you have to do, its something you see if you CAN do. Like climbing a mountain. Can I do it? Will this peice of crap MSI/PIII do 1.2 gigs? Its something computer hobbyists do. So what if it voids the damn warranty? If your so worried about it then obviously you need to ditch the BMF who is holding a gun to your head making you do it. Remember that personal computing used to be purely a hobbyists pursuit. That's how the Apple II came to be.
Cool. Never the less, its also cool to buy a chip rated for 700 MHz and push that sucker up over a Gig; let us not forget the overclockability of the recent cC0 stepping of Intel FC-PGA PIIIs... I have one. If you use liquid cooling you can keep that baby humming at 1.03 gigs rock solid. Not bad for a $170 processor.
No.
I bought a Duron 650 for $80 CDN, overclocked it to 900Mhz using the standard "Chrome Orb" fan that everyone seems to have, and it never (and I do mean never ever) crashes. Windows 2000 of course. Van
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Everytime an article is written about overclocking, hundreds of messages get sent across the internet about how bad it is, wasting all this bandwidth and causing all us hundreds of readers extra CPU time to go through and read the messages, which is the damn reason us O/C'ers do it in the first place. The message regarding tighter code, this glove fits on your hand too. Look, I have a dual 366 running at 550, was running for months on standard fans, $0 expense extra for %150 performance. I went out and spent AU$40 on 2 big heatsinks and fans in the hope I could pull somewhere like 733 out of them, but alas, only the die-hard O/C'ers can do that. Oh well, no matter it brought the temperatures down, and all that good stuff, yay. So I'm practically running a 1.1GhZ machine, which I brought at the end of the Celeron 366 reign, I grabbed like the last 2 from the shelves when they were out of stock, they were like AU$100 each, at the time, the highest spec processor was like a 700, yet I had a 1.1Ghz machine 100% stability for what AU$200 for the cpu's ? My next upgrade will go from the BP6 to a VP6, purely for the onboard raid and higher cpu capability, I have a celeron 733 at home, it has 100% standard fans and everytihg and by simply pressing a few buttons it jumped up to 825Mhz, perfect, 915Mhz, perfect. It hasn't gotten to over 1Ghz which I'd like, but I might try again another time, I believe it can do it with 100% stability, and will only run it at that speed if it is 100% stable. And a celeron 733 atm is AU$180. When it comes down to about AU$120-130 I'll buy 2 of them, and have a Dual 773 running at somewhere between 1.83Ghz and 2.22Ghz. You show me somewhere that in about 1-2 months or so you get an un-overclocked CPU with 100% reliability of that capability for ~AU$250. Morale of the story is, (and most of this has been said by the O/C'ers who have already replied)that overclockers do it because they want the most out of their machine, and to get the most you have to have 100% reliability. There are a whole range of overclockers out there, people like me who just want to get the most out of the engine with simple tweaks making the most out of what they have in front of them, like a backyard mechanic doing up his car, and it extends all the way to the other end of the spectrum where you have the thermal cooling, refrigeration powerhouses, etc. They are nothing more than the people out there who drag-race there 600kw supercharged nitrous funny cars. So try to understand that overclocking doesn't have to cost money and it doesn't have to cost reliability. A conclusion far too many people jump to because they haven't tried it themselves, or because they have had or heard of a bad experience due to doing something wrong.
Many machines are really at the limits when you try to OC. But some will give you astonishing results without loss of reliability.
My world is not Windows, i'm a Unix geek. If i OC too hard, my OS will notice and "panic" or SEGV or whatever. I do not tolerate three crashes per week. When i OC, then i go near the limit but not over it.
I have tried to OC a lot of machines in my life and most of them actually weren't worth the effort and i went back to standard settings. And no CPU was killed by my moderate tries.
But some times i hit a CPU that goes amazingly far beyond specs. Sometimes i can only guess why. Here are my top OC'd CPUs:
- Sun 3/60 (68020@20) runs fine @24 and @25 MHz
- HP Vectra 4/50 (486DX2@50) runs fine @66 MHz
- Pentium-II 266 runs fine @448 MHz
Both the Sun 3/60 and the HP Vectra are no single exemplars! I have OC'd sucessfully several of each type!On the Sun 3/60 i usually spend a passive cooler for the 68020 and the 68881 FPU and replace the 9 chip SIMMs by faster 3 chip types.
The Vectras attracted me because their CPU was totally cold. Raising the FSB to 33MHz gave them a nice boost and the CPUs became only moderately warm.
The P-II-266 should be a Klamath, but has obviously a Coppermine core because it sucks only 2.0V. I wasn't very surprised when it ran perfectly at 4*100 MHz. With an Abit BH-6 mainboard i was finally able to run it at 4*112 MHz (and 2.1V core voltage).
Peter
Finally...someone that understands completely
I once underclocked an AST 'Bravo' '286 machine.
It had the metal rectangular crystal block, and it was socketed. I was curious to see how slow I could make the machine boot up. It started out as an 8 MHz '286 machine, using a 16 MHz crystal. I put in a 4 MHz crystal. It s-l-o-w-l-y went through the POST and booted up. You haven't seen a slow bootup until you've seen the floppy diskette seek go by like a mantel clock. tick-tic-tick as it steps up to track zero and back.
Then, I plugged in this 32.768 Kilohertz crystal block (the smallest I had on hand). It never booted. There are dynamic registers in the '286, and probably in many other chips on the motherboard, so it wasn't running fast enough to even operate.
That's what fun is all about, eh?
Don't be such a troll. You're making a big assumption that all /. readers/nerds already know about over-clocking. Posting a story is only half of it: the rest is comprised of the discussions that follow. This is stuff that is interesting to nerds, and they to discuss it. Thus it seems relevant. /. posts stuff that is of interest to somebody, but not necessarily everyone... that's what CNN.com is for. Not all nerds have the same interests or expertise, so don't be so judgemental.
Sorry, that isn't sufficient to guarantee system reliability. Do you have a $10 million chip tester in your basement?
My $10 million chip tester is simulated by my own practical needs. If it works, great. If it doesn't, it was just an amusing science experiment. Given enough worst case trials, one can calculate the density of smoke.
Do it to a business system and the local BOFH will break your legs.
For one moment, let's please seperate one's place of employment from what they can do in the privacy in their own bedroom. Of course, placing one's employer at great risks for dubious returns is moronic.
All CPUs are about chip yield in the baking process. Take a basic design and manufacture it to a given specification and tolerance and run it up to an arbitrary speed until the failure rate is < 3 Sigma. That is the speed rating of the core. Weigh the value of doing that agains the cost of the yield of a given percentage of wafers that can actually pass that test. That is the watermark for the chip you buy. As the manufacturing process gets better the yield at that testing level gets better which drives the unit cost down. Below a certain cost threshold it now becomes economically feasible to step the testing thresshold up higher - eg. a faster speed and rerun all of your tests to the new test limit for the same > 3 Sigma confidence interval.
Lather Rinse Repeat.
So when you OC all your doing is throwing the dice that your thresshold will work within the limits of the chip already put through the same tests by the manufacturer. So literally your chances of successfully OCing are better the further into the manufacturing lifecycle you are. That is, you probably couldn't reliably OC a Pentium 60 or 66 w/o setting it afire but Celeron 450 - wooo is that tried and true !
Hey You are wrong here. If you overclock by upping the bus speed the Graphics card, and mem bandwidth will increase as well. The network is almost always a bottleneck regardless of CPU. You can saturate a T1 with a 100mhz CPU. So that is not really an argument for OC or not.
Help fight continental drift.
How is that a bad analogy? When you spend more money on fixing something to be what that extra money could buy in the first place IT IS STUPID. This is the same as if you bought a car or a computer or anything. You wind up just buying the one you should have bought in the first place, or dealing with the problems.
Buy quality or buy twice.
It is light enough that I guess they could have been bouncing it by leaning back and forth real fast...
You are 100% correct! :-)
With the price of AMD Duron CPU's under US$100 even for the 750 MHz versions, trying to make it go even faster is a silly idea unless you're willing to spend the extra money for a decent 300W power supply, a top-quality heatsink/fan, and extra cooling fans inside the system case.
I'd rather spend the money on getting at least 128 MB of system RAM and a decent 7200 RPM ATA-66/100 hard drive, where the benefits are more immediate (and cheap given the recent prices for 168-pin DIMM's and hard drives). A lot of people forget that with enough RAM you swap far less to the hard drive virtual memory, and with a fast hard drive data can be read off the hard drive a lot faster than the older 5400 RPM drives.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Ok, true. By overclocking, you are probably shortening the life of your CPU, but CPUs and motherboards have a pretty short functional life anyhow.
How long do you expect to keep your current CPU and motherboard? Are you still using that 30 MHz I386 based computer you bought 10 years ago? Not likely. It's probably sitting, fully functional, in a landfill somewhere. You sure aren't running quake on it, unless you're a masochist.
If you're planning on keeping your computer for years, then overclocking is a bad idea. However, if you replace your computer, CPU, or motherboard every year to get the hottest new chip, then it doesn't matter if you reduce the life of your CPU from 10 years or more to 18 months. Better to get your money's worth out of it by using it up then to throw it away working perfectly. Old computers have zero resale value anyhow.
Top race car drivers burn through several sets of tires and wear out an entire engine driving a major race. It's the cost of winning. Think of overclocking as doing the same thing to your computer. It has tradeoffs; it's a cost/benefit situation.
So, I underclock the CPU to 100MHz, and have removed the CPU fan. The power-supply fan is disconnected, because the case interior simply does not get hot. There is no disk drive in the machine (it netboots) and the box is totally silent.
This is so cool! It's like a PC low-rider!
whats funny is that people do that with relatively cheap cars all the time. haven't you seen a honda accord with a spoiler? people have their hobbies~overclocking fords and cpu's.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
you're too young ... in 1992 i OC/ed my 16Mhz 286 to 22Mhz (replaced the 33Mhz quartz with an 44.6Mhz one (from some burnt video-card or smth)).
:).
(the machine died after 7 years of heavy usage - overclocking is bad
And in '90 have seen an Z80 Sinclair spectrum compatible overclocked form 3.5Mhz to 6Mhz. It would occasionally lose the front at memory accesses (memory too slow). The fun part was to write a program like:
10 PRINT SQRT 2
20 GOTO 10
let-it run and the flick the switch to 6Mhz - it would began to print strange numbers CLOSE to sqrt(2) and eventually reset/lock itself.
--
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
I would like to say I over clock because I need the cycles and it is less expensive than buying a new CPU... However, it is more a hobby than most anything else.
;-)
Consider people who buy a car for $1000 and put $8000 into it, so it is "factory" (circa 1972). Insane? Perhaps, however I look at it like any other interest. If you are willing to spend the time to learn (and there are plenty of places to learn), and you are willing to accept the risk, go for it...
If you are looking for logic, it can only be found in a few places. My C300A running at 450 saved me a couple hundred when I bought it, and an upgrade. However, I also knew that the chip was solid, the update easy and effective cooling possible (and cheap).
Other people sky dive and they call me crazy..
What a content-free article! As far as I can tell, this is the only paragraph that contains any information on the drawbacks of overclocking, and even then is pretty light!
Knowledgeable overclockers can keep a system running smoothly for years, but risks still abound. The most common overclocking techniques increase the power supplied to everything connected to the motherboard, meaning that graphics processors, hard drives and other components may overheat or perform erratically. But stray cooling fluids can short out components, and a wrong setting or loose screw can wreak havoc.
I'm interested in overclocking, and I'd like to know what damage I could do if I'm not careful. Can someone who actually knows what they're talking about list some specifc drawbacks to overclocking?
--
There may be many reasons not to kill you, but among them is not that you'll be missed by NASA - The Long Kiss Goodnight
Let's overclock this Zilog 80 to 1 GhZ!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The best analogy/explanation/justification I've come up with for overclocking and case modding (props to http://www.virtualhideout.net and their case gallery) is the 50's hotrod.
Just like with hotrods, the joy is also in the DOING, not just the end results. Tinkering with your (carburator|front side bus) for that extra performance... installing a (airscoop|blowhole fan) for extra airflow... decorating it with (racing stripes|neon glowtubes). It's all fun!
And strangely enough, people in automobile-mad North America accept it really well once the hotrod analogy is explained to them. :)
Whenever the wife says I do!
-Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
You'll also want to underclock your system because by doing so, you'll reduce heat still further.
Basically you are right but IMHO underclocking can be just as dangerous as overclocking and can lead to undesired instability. The key is to make sure you burn in the processor just as if you are going to overlock before you underclock.
First off, your case usually shields from EMR. Secondly, when you OC, you only emit about the same EMR as a processor of that speed. In other words, I have a 700Mhz processor running at 950Mhz. This does not emit much more EMR than a 950Mhz T-bird.
If this still concerns you, then simply don't do it. In fact, do not use a computer/monitor, do not live near power lines, do not watch TV too closely, do not stand near the microwave, do not get a gas/electric hybrid automobile, do not use a cell phone, do not use a cordless phone, do not put your desk near a wall in your office that has more than one AC outlet...
Okay, now that is getting carried away but my point is that EMF is everywhere in our world. Yes, some devices produce much more than others however they all add up. From the studies that I have read, the monitor is the most dangerous culprit aside from high-voltage electric wiring. I do not see how an overclocked PC can be much worse unless the case is open and right next to you. If you take the simple precaution of closing up the case and putting it a safe distance from where you sit, you should be fine.
Heh. It's fun to be in the position of having more knowledge than most, and say, 'if I missed anything, feel free to correct me...'
No corrections, but a bit of emphasis. If you overclock, you're going to _significantly_ increase the time-to-failure of a chip, due to circuit trace migration. Run current through a trace on a chip, and the actual metal atoms start to travel away from the trace. This is part of the design limitations, and when you exceed the normal operating specs, you can really crank up the speed at which migration happens. (can't remember the details, but it sure ain't linear!)
That said, I suspect the MTBF for a modern is somewhere on the order of 20 years. If you shorten the life by 75%, you're still looking at a 5 year life, which as you said is about as long as a processor is likely to be useful anyways.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
...then you shouldn't have any problems.
I have a p2 (klamath, the hottest of the bunch) overclocked from 233 to 300 with a decent fan/heatsink and I've never had any instability problems.
I don't know about the kind of heat that the newer cpus put out, but as long as it's properly cooled and ventilated I wouldn't think you'd have any problems at all.
And of course, YMMV.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
You are not recognizing that some overclockers get a lot more than "2-5 percent" out of their systems. Look at all the people who got their Celeron 300A's running at 450MHz. That's a huge speed gain and a savings of hundreds of dollars. There are plenty of more current examples too.
Overclocking does have a place, and as long as there is any "slop" in processor speed ratings it always will.
Curiously, you know how scientists make liquid oxygen? They cool it down using liquid nitrogen. The boiling point of nitrogen is approximately 77 kelvin whereas the boiling point for oxygen is about 90 kelvin.
Also a curious fact, oxygen is paramagnetic- meaning it will orient itself in line with a magnet. A really neat experiment with liquid oxygen is dribble it into a really strong magnet field and watch it stick to one of the sides.
Also, I would like to point out that those who think that overclocking is simply stupid, they should look at the current state of the hardware industry. They, in a sensem overclock their chips all of the time. That's why they need more cooling apparatus. Its part of the design of the chip.
Even more damning is the new thing with copper leads. You hear great things about it making a faster chip, but if you talk to a materials engineering undergrad, he'll tell you that the people designing those chips don't know if the copper is going to diffuse into the insulation and cause failure in the next 3 years or not. The fact of the matter is that these companies are pushing barriers to be competitive, and if a person is smart enough and interested enough to try, they can expand the efforts of the manufacturer even more.. After all, a 400 MHz chip is typically the same as a 500MHz chip of the same model, its just that ones passed certain QC tests while the others didn't.. So if you have a 400 MHz chip, its quite possible that it will be stable at a higher clock, if you bother to extensively test it and monitor its temperature. You can afford to do more rigorous testing on an individual CPU than Intel or AMD can when they ship thousands of these things at a time.
Am I the only one here that thinks that a C|Net article on OCing has no bearing to most of the slashdot community?
Well, I'm a member of the Slashdot community, and I know next to nothing about serious overclocking -- least of all the complicated cooling systems involved in it. I got a good oversight from the article, and a better one from the ensuing discussion here. Not *all* nerds and geeks practice overclocking, you know; some just do code.
In addition, C|Net provided a heap of external and internal links to additional overclocking information in the right-hand bar of the story. So if you wanted to know more, they gave you plenty of more-authoritative places to go.
As a postscript, that's only half the reason I submitted this story to Slashdot. The other half was to see what it finally took to get a story admitted by Slashdot, since my last eight eclecticly-chosen submissions were rejected while a duplicate article on Napster was posted just yesterday by an editor who didn't know how to use his own site's search engine. My conclusion: the only thing I did with this submission that I didn't do with the others was submit it as early in the day as possible. *shrug*
It's usually like this: I had a $160 budget for my CPU and heat-sink combo. Instead of buying a T-bird 900 for $148 and an $8 heat-sink/fan to go with it, I bought a $118 T-bird 850 and a $29.00 Taisol heat-sink/fan to go with it. No anti-freeze, no crazy hardware, just a larger hunk of steel and a larger diameter fan.
Then, I experimented once I got the 850 CPU to see what I could clock it at. At 1100 MHz, it wouldn't POST or boot. At 1050 MHz, it would boot and run stable under loads, temperature measured (by simple onboard hardware) at about 43 degrees celsius.
So, I backed it down to 1000 MHz in the interest of ensuring stability, ran a continuous 3D benchmark on it for 120 hours straight to make sure it didn't crash or overheat at that speed, and then put it into service. For the same price as a slower T-bird 900 and a cheaper heat-sink/fan, I now own a T-bird running at 1.0 GHz at around 39-40 degrees celsius, well within the rated temperature range for the T-bird Athlon processor as per AMD specs.
No aquarium pumps, no sawing, no bending, puncturing, no hazardous substances... My case remains quiet and the sides are all on. The processor runs an MPEG-2 encoder under Linux 24/7 and has done so very well for months now.
THIS is how most overclockers work, I think, and it's not insane at all. It's called getting the most for your buck. For those of you who think it's unethical... Well... Be sure to always buy your hard drive upgrades direct from Compaq, rather than from a third-party, "aftermarket" hard drive dealer. But hard drive's are more expensive that way, you say?
Hey, it's in your paperwork. Always use only genuine Compaq parts for upgrades. To do anything else is to break The Rules[TM].
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
When's the last time a hot girl wanted to ride shotgun on your PC? Now hold on! I'm about to login!
It's cool to juice up anything but not the same....... 'nuff said
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
While I can understand where you come from, I would have to say I disagree. The OC community is so far in the minority of chip buyers that it's laughable. IOW, the ratio of OC'ers:Non-OC'ers is so low that Intel/AMD don't even care. It's like the record industry going after kids for watching DVD's on their linux boxes. oops....:-)
seriously though, I see OC'ers hurting Intel's/AMD profits as the same as a kid who spits in the atlantic and worrys about coastal flooding. Besides, if it was such a big deal that it was hurting profits, Intel/AMD would go after mobo makers.
/me knocks on wood
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
With insanely fast CPUS available for ridiculously cheap prices, why bother? It's kind of like buying a ford Focus, and spend a lot of money and time souping up the engine. Just buy a fast car (chip) if you need one! Am I missing something?
Optimize the configuration of your apps, os , and code. If all of our code was tightly optimized for the tasks we have at hand in internet servers, over convenience and general flexibility, we would need much less horsepower under the hood. I see highly optimized applications on a pc outperform similar apps on the largest enterprise sun machines, due to their great design. We don't need 3000mhz to handle most of our applications, we need better code. of course exceptions always apply, but im giving a general rule of thumb in the ISP/ASP industry. worst coding i've ever seen.
===sam=== free nessus vulnerability scan = www.vulnerabilities.org
Peril: When was the last time you got laid?
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
An example of a risky overclock is one where the PCI bus and, hence, all of the peripherals are running past their intended speeds. This can lead to IDE hard drive corruption (seen it happen), instability, etc.
Basically, my rule of thumb is that I never overclock if it will cost me more money. Nothing looks as stupid as some dweeb who has invested $300 to get a Celeron to run at 1ghz -- when you can now buy 1ghz Thunderbirds for less than $200.
It has been axiomatic since the earliest days of computing that the best way to test a configuration is to run it for an extended period of time. The factory doesn't do this because it can't afford to. The overclockers are doing exactly what companies like IBM and Data General used to do to prove their designs. Go back and read Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine and tell me an overclocker can't do a better job than those engineers did of getting reliability out of their systems.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
You ever take apart an engine, chop or channel her or manybe drop a 470hp engine and do the 1/4 in 9.7 seconds flat.
Down here in Newark NJ, I see guys with outright race cars that pull low 10's down to mid 9's and they make a living off of racing on the street.
Talk about hacking a car. These guys are using Mazda motors imported from Japan, The guy's in japan get them from the junk yard (motors not produced for USA). Hell they even give the guys on bike's a run for there money ( block to clock racing )
Don't mock these guys, they are the same as overclockers, just in a differnt game. Plus it's cool to post your best time on your window and get the bragging rights.
ONEPOINT
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If you want more disk space, you open the case and add another hard disk.
So if you want an extra 33-200MHz, why not open the case and toss in a spare 486 or two? I've got an old Dell 486 at home if you're interested...
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I love to work with hardware. To me overclocking is a lot of fun. Sure, I could go buy a 1.2GHz Ahtlon, but I rather push my 1GHz to 1.2. Some people like to hack code, I like to mess with hardware.
;)
A lot of people don't OC because they think it causes instability. If a system is not stable after being overlcocked, then it isn't a success! If my system is one bit less stable than before, the speed goes back down.
Most OCers put their systems through serious torture tests to make sure they are stable. I bet most normal users don't do any tests like that.
So..in the end I get a faster system and several hours of enjoyment. It's fun to put on a new fan and lower the CPU temp by 2C.
I have far too many machines that I need 24/7 access to, many of them remotely, to risk stability for an increase in speed. While it's true that overclocking reduces the lifetime of products by such an insignificant amount (assuming you don't fry them) that they'll still die long after they've outlived their use, I'd still prefer not needing to drive an hour away just because my machine overheated from being clocked up an extra 50 mhz or so.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
This post was copied almost verbatim (first sentence was changed) from a post back on Feb 20th in the Building The Fastest Desktop Possible article.
Hardly. To recap a few overclocking endeavors:
My linux server is a meager Pent 200 OC to 250. Not much, but I can 'feel' the difference. No extra cooling etc. needed.
2 OC celeron 300's @450/500. No extra anything, and I saved a few hundred bucks.
Present main system is a t-bird 700 OC to 1050. The only extra items are a $25 FOP38 HSF, and a couple old case fans I had in a box. Runs about 5-8 degrees warmer OC. Again, this saved me several 100 bucks at the time I built it.
There have been a couple others I don't remember specifics on (166 to 208 etc). But in the long run, I was out a $25 HSF, a little bit of 'tinker time', and $3 for some good thermal grease. Now if I wanted to go water-cooled, or some such, it would be much more expensive, but this is not necessary to save considerable cash. I view the whole water-cooled/peltier side of OC as a hobby. I'd never run one of these as a server, but for fun....why not? I've spent 2-3 hundred bucks on things for more frivolous, as I figure most people have.
In the long run, I've saved enough cash that my next PC (if I OC again) will be paid for with all the money I've saved over time. I certainly smile when I think about that.
-Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Nude Overclockers
Really! This is not a joke.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
However, one thing that has struck me is that overclocking increases the prices of chips, on the whole. When someone buys a cheap chip, and then OC's it, they are not paying the huge surcharge on the latest technology that everyone else has to, and so they are prolonging those inflated prices. Basic supply and demand, as outlined by Adam Smith, shows that this is irrefutably the case.
The question is one of morals. Myself, I have no particular problem with it. But many people may rightly regard overclocking as cheating, with some good reason. I am happy to admit that I am a cheater - I don't give a shit.
Still, I can hardly blame the hardware companies for multiplier locking chips - if the problem didn't exist, they wouldn't have to.
But so what. In the end, I'm an OC'er, and proud.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
The Athlon was also bleeding-edge overclocking; they now have a device for $20 to $50 US that will allow you to overclock a Slot A Athlon without cracking the case and desoldering and resoldering resistors.
The only real drawback I've seen to overclocking is the possiblity of frying your processor, motherboard or other components. The person who got me into overclocking toasted 6 Abit BP6 motherboards trying to figure out how to get a Coppermine Celeron to work in the board. While studing the pin diagrams and attempting to reroute traces on the motherboard isn't the norm, it does happen.
Aside from horror stories like the one above, there are two things to watch for when overclocking: heat and over-voltage.
As for heat, don't skimp on the heat sinks and check a page like [H]ard|OCP or Toms Hardware (links below) for heatsink information, case modifications and the like.
Voltage can be trickier to deal with. As bus and processor speeds become higher and higher, the transistor count rises and, hence, the current required by the processor, chipset and other components of the system. Modern processors lower the voltage significantly in order to conserve current. Some processors require 2 volts (or less!) in the core. If you're familiar with electronics at all, you'll soon see that the signal to noise ratio becomes a real factor. The solution is to increase the signal by raising the voltage. It's a tightrope act; raise the voltage too high and you could fry your chip in microseconds, not high enough and it doesn't add any noise rejection but does add heat.
Something that used is cited as a factor now that I don't really find relavent is processor life. Transistors do not last forever. Stuff that goes on at the quantum level degrades the PNP/NPN junctions over time. Granted, in most situations this can be over the course of years or decades, but with transistors as small as those in a typical processor die, it's generally on the lines of 5 to 7 years. That's if you run them at the manufacturer's suggested voltage. Increase the voltage, decrease the life.
That being said, with processors doubling in speed every 18 months or so, I don't really see any current chip being in service on a desktop 7 years from now. Even if you were to cut the operating life of your processor in half from 7 to 4.5 years, would it matter much? Incedentally, I have a Linux box here running on a Pentium 166MMX overclocked to 233. I bought the processor and motherboard in '97 or '98, if I remember correctly. It's been on 24/7 for all but the few days it took to move from California to Phoenix.
If you're interested in overclocking, the best way to get into it is to search the hardward sites, read their guides and try it.
It will also help to know a bit more about the x86 architecture. For example, understanding the workings of SDRAM fetch settings in your BIOS, how to figure out the PCI bus speed after overclocking your motherboard's bus from 133 to 145 and so on. [H]ard|OCP and Toms Hardware (links I promised above =) have some very good information on just that sort of thing.
If I missed anything or blew a couple of concepts, feel free to offer a friendly correction. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!
Good luck!
/tma
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Note that if you overclock your CPU, bus speed, memory bandwith, graphics card performance, network speed and harddisk perfomance are still unchanged.
Those factors are often the bottlenecks of your system. For example, Quake3 performance depends *heavily* on graphics card performance, running graphical apps over the network eats network performance (duh), running lots of apps simultaniously eats ram, and if you're doing a kernel compile, you'll want a fast HD and lots of ram (granted, a fast CPU helps here, too).
My point here is that CPU speed is rarely a bottleneck for me, so it's not worth the cost, time and risks of overclocking. So, I'm not saying it's not a fun hobby, but I don't think its very useful to OC just for the sake of a faster computer.
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in order to reduce noise & electrical consumption. For example, I have a baby-AT system with a Pentium 200MMX processor. It needs to run in a quiet environment.
... faster ain't always better.
So, I underclock the CPU to 100MHz, and have removed the CPU fan. The power-supply fan is disconnected, because the case interior simply does not get hot. There is no disk drive in the machine (it netboots) and the box is totally silent.
Just goes to show
Everytime there is a story about overclocking on Slashdot the naysayers flood the forums with comments about how terrible an idea it is to overclock. They say things like "You only save a little bit and spend more on cooling..." or "Your chip will be unstable and then have a shorter life."
I would like to clear some things up about overcloking for the uninformed people.
Firstly, the stability issue. Overclockers hate instability. Most of us go way out of our way to make sure that the system we are running is not going to be acting all flaky when we overclock. The whole point of overclocking is to get the most out of the system, and if your system is freezing all of the time you aren't getting much out of it are you? We accomplish this by running benchmarks and torture tests to make sure that the overclock isn't adversely affecting performance or stability, if it is then we step it off.
Second, with the exception of a few extreme instances, most overclockers save money for the same performance. We don't all go out and buy peltiers and liquid cooled heatsinks. Most of us spend more on cooling than the average person but not by much, and our cooling system usually lasts through several cpus. Compare the $50 hsf I'm using now with your $10, so I spent $40 more than average, big deal, I saved $300 on the cpu and I'll use this cooler with my next upgrade too.
Which brings me to the savings. We save a lot of money for the performance. When I purchased my Celeron300A I spent $109 for it and after I overclocked it, the performance I got out of the chip in games at the time was almost identicle to a P2-450 which was selling for well over $600.
Now thats about as good as overclocking gets, but there are many other examples of chips since then that have done almost as well.
That celeron300a I spoke of is still running at the same overclocked speed as the day I put it in, and it's rock solid. You want stability, there you go.
On top of all of this, overclocking is fun! No really. It's an enjoyable experience, you learn a lot about hardware, and at the end of the day you can be happy that you have a screaming fast system for a fraction of the price you could have spent.
If you want to think about overclocking try checking out some of the sites around the net:
www.overclockers.com
www.hardocp.com
www.anandtech.com
www.tomshardware.com
Try it, you might like it.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Am I the only one here that thinks that a C|Net article on OCing has no bearing to most of the slashdot community? C|Net has a reputation for barely technical articles, glossing over subjects and missing out on all the important details. The real details are available (and have been for a long time) on sites like AnandTech, Tom's Hardware and others. Besides, most of the /. crowd already knows about overclocking and is not going to benefit from a story like this. This is not news for nerds. This is not stuff that matters. If I could moderate this story, it would definately get a -1, Redundant.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
The article missed one of the coolest elements of the overclocking phenomena. Overclockers today are like the hot rodders of the 50's and 60's. Ask them why they spend hours and dollars to crank out that extra 2-5 percent and they will look at you like you just don't get it.
There will always be a base of people who want to push their toys/hobbies to the limit. We've moved from cars to bikes to boats and now PC's.
Hobbyist underclocking is starting to take off. The MP3mobile, a home-built MP3 player for autos, involved a Pentium 166 underclocked to 125MHz. Automotive hardware is often underclocked; the thermal and power environment of the auto is fierce.
As for the gamers, they're probably better off getting a graphics card upgrade. The current generation of graphics boards are essentially overclocked already; current NVidia products have heat sinks on the RAM.
George W Bush had discovered that Tom Leufkens had struck a secret deal with NASA to ship his 500MHz Celeron to Pluto, where he believed the surface temperature would allow him to run the machine at 3.3GHz.
Bush, the current champion overclocker (his Hillary-Clinton-cooled P75 benchmarked 900MHz last Friday) foiled the world-record attempt just in time.
In a statement, Bush was reported as saying "Ain't no pissin' on the presedential PC."
Asikaa
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
I put it in a Frigidaire freezer side.
Go on...
Which I tried to bury in a snowdrift.
Which was because...?
The Frigidaire was smoking.
I see... and what did you hope to gain from all this
33 more MHz.
to...
1367MHz.
That is quite impressive for an 80286.
It's like an addiction, doctor, I just can't stop!
There, there. We'll break this addiction, it just takes time.
Thanks, Doc, do you think my girlfriend will ever come back?
Perhaps, but in the meantime, I have this old Pentium II, what do you think you could do with it?
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When you build a new chip you build software models of the entire chip - right down to the gate and polygon level, you do a LOT of timing analysis - these days we extract the polygons and do 3d parasitic extraction - this takes a long time (days for a big chip) - but the results are by their nature statistical - because the results of building a particular chip are somewhat staistical (depends on etch rates, temp, etc etc at the fab) so we calculate the worst case fast and worst case slow process corners and use the timing tools to check all the potential timing paths (thing combinatorial explosion here). After we think we have something that will make timing we build some - at the fab at the begeinning we get the fab guys to explicitly vary the process to push some wafers into each 'corner' of the process - then we bring those die into the lab and use them to make sure that they will work at speed within the various temp ranges the chip is supposed to work at.
One of the problems with making chips is that testing them is VERY expensive - the testing machines that do die and chip sorting cost millions of $$ and the number of seconds a die spends on one effects the final cost - so you design your tests to uncover raw defects (via scan and maybe functional tests) and speed problems by using the results of your original timing imulations to identify the timing paths that are so close to the edge that they are likely to fail first - because the testers don't have access to most of the internal nodes you have to do things like overclocking by say 10% and then hoping the internal logic will fail in some manner that you can catch (you also use the previous lab work to validate this approach by identifying known bad chips and making sure they fail on the tester).
One thing you can do is 'bin' chips - test them at different frequencies and sell the ones that happen to be faster for more - because binning is a more expensive process its usually only done for CPUs and other expensive sorts of chips.
What commonly happens over the lifetime of a chip is that as the process improves the number of die that fall into the faster bins increases - however for marketting reasons a company may wish to continue to sell the 'faster' ones at a premium so it will label some fast chips as 'slower' so to keep their product mix in the market (a fancy way of saying 'so they can make more money'). I'm told the same thing happens with olive oil :-)
Now the chips are vey carefully screened and carefull spec sheets are written for them - you buy an 850MHz chip from AMD or Intel and it will work at 850 within the appropriate voltage/temp range specified on the data sheet (if not as, we've seen, Intel will recall chips that don't) - it's not in the chip manufacturer's interest to sell chips that don't work - they get soldered on to expensive boards and expensive system which have to be trashed at the OEM if they don't work - those data sheets make sure that to parts in a million those chips work as advertised.
Having said that - some chips do run faster if overclocked - you can always tell which ones - because you don't know which process corner the die was fabbed at - or what the binning policies were the day it was manufactured etc etc - even worse yet - and here's my traditional warning - WARNING - your overclocked CPU may work perfectly for months because what you're doing may not exercise the slowest timing path(s) in the design (remember combinatorial explosion!) - you might play quake for months on end without a problem .... then silently drop $1000 off your tax refund ....
Let's see what happens when I try this liquid oxyge...
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Pro:
Save $100 on a chip.
Con:
Spend $300 on cooling gear.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
Right now I have a 600MHZ athlon and it sounds like an airconditioner is running in my study. So if I got a 1.2 GHZ cpu and ran it at say 700-850 MHZ, I could theoretically take the fan out of my box (but keep the heatsink), use less electricity and it would last longer (besides being faster than my current cpu). Is there a downside to my logic that I am not seeing? My view of cpu's needing any/better cooling technology is to me an indication that cpu manufacturers ARE over-clocking thier cpus... just not as much as enthusiast do. Is there a reason why Intel/AMD/Cyrix etc... need better cooling besides the HZ war:
if (MyCPU.MHZ > Other.MHZ) {
BankAccount = (BankAccount + BetterSales)
}
I miss the Karma Whores.
...until you've seen a 386 boot at 400 Mhz. It won't run, but it'll boot.
God, I love the smell of silicon in the morning!
This