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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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However, they know know their car, inside and out. They can tell you exactly what each bit is for, how it worked when they got the car, how it works now, and why it's better. They know the limitations of their car intimately. They've gained real world experience in hacking on cars and enjoyed themselves to boot. What's so silly about that? It's the process that's important, not the results. What is cool is that it was done. The same holds true for computer overclockers.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
That's nothing. My friend knows a guy who overclocked, and his LEG FELL OFF!!!!
Don't do it! It's too risky!
Later,
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
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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Okay, let's compare it to the auto industry. Are you aware that many cars are speed-governed by their ECU (Engine Control Unit) computers? Do you know that tires have speed ratings and many can go faster than rated without flying apart? Gasoline is sold by "minimum" octane rating (it may be higher). Towing capacity, load capacity, and even radio wattage may all be greater than stated. Are all of these examples of "fraud" as you define it?
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.
Why should the cost of all chips be driven through the roof by forcing manufacturers to "rigorously" test each and every one to determine the absolute maximum speed capability? If a manufacturer knows the every chip off of the line can do 600mhz, why shouldn't the manufacturer just label some of them 600mhz and sell them at a low price? The reason that you can get cheap 700mhz CPUs is that someone else is willing to subsidize the cost by paying extra for 1.1ghz CPUs -- which have a higher reject rate and require more testing.
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.
Almost every industry does this. You overengineer a device, so that flaws that occur during the manufacturing process don't break down the guarantee.
If I see a sign that says `2 ton limit' on a bridge, it better take 2 tons. In fact, I'd be unhappy if it had problems with 2.5 tons.
I don't understand why they're upset about over-clocking (and trying to make it more difficult). Yes, you can buy a 1 GHz processor and over clock it to 1.2 GHz (or whatever the number is...I don't OC, so don't use these numbers as a basis for OC planning). Alternatively, you could pay for that 1.3 GHz processor and OC it to 1.5 GHz. In my mind, the manufacturers should be out there challenging people to OC their processors, so that they learn the actual limits of their processors, find new ideas on cooling, encourage OC'ers to buy the top-of-the-line and make it run better.
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