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Muscle Cars And Smokin' Chips
YetAnotherGeekGuy writes "IEEE Computer has an article this month, "The Zen of Overclocking" by Bob Colwell. In it the author compares overclockers to hot rodders (which, in my personal experience, are two sets with a significant intersection). More importantly he talks about the phenomenon, the culture, the attitude, and the natural tension between them and the industry in the quest for the right balance between performance and reliability. Thought-provoking, and some good one-liners. Enjoy!"
They both appeal to people who like to have unnecessary power, simply for the sake of having the additional power, and being able to say "My XYZ can outperform your XYZ", even though efficiency or safety drop dramatically. They're both pretty useless, but they can both be enjoyed as hobbies.
Except that most kids today think that souping up a PC means a window and lights.
I'll stick with my stock (i.e. quiet) box anyday.
--
I think there really is a parallel between car-modifiers and pc-modifiers. There's really four classes:
a) The "don't know, don't care" crowd. They let a salesman or a "friend who knows about [computers|cars]" tell them what to buy, and they take it to the shop for every bit of maintanence.
b) The DIYers (like myself) who will change their own oil, brakes, and motherboards.
c) The real overclokers, and the hot-rodders, who push the boundaries of their chosen field, and are really into getting the most performance from their machines.
d) Ricers. People with "Type R" stickers, big wings, windows in their cases, clear fans, and who think neon has any place apart from outside a strip-joint.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Braking from 150mph into an increasing radius turn off the back straight on the other hand.. Women like men who are confident, and there's not much room for indecision on a racetrack.
:-)
(Often) ladies don't find too much that's macho about a XP chip running at 3000mhz (duh), and there's not much risk other than the possible damage to your bank account. So I think this article is just tripe to make those with low self esteem feel better about themselves.
"Overclockers say, "Instead of buying a new PC, just overclock the old one."
I don't know any overclockers that say that. I run a mildly overclocked system because I can with no impact on reliability. I've run extremely overclocked and watercooled systems in the past. It was not done to save money on a new PC - a combination of the very top of the line being insanely priced, and "because I can". This article feels like fluff and has a questionable feel to it. I'm suprised it's from the IEEE.
On the other hand, in my own experience fast cars are a lot more fun than fast women.
..don't panic
I think he made good comparisons and was right on. I wish more people would catch on to things like he mentioned about the locking of chips. The groups that think some company is conspiring against them are as he says insignificant. Probably at best 1% of people overclock, and even then it just means better chance Intel and AMD will get to sell this person more chips since the person fried theirs. This same concept can be expanded to most any conspiracy their people come up with, especialy the ones thought up by many people here.
Then again, such groups of people never seam to catch on that they don't matter.
This isn't a troll, just a point, so many people come up with these ideas about companies doing this or that to block linux, or saying linux has so much influence, but the reality is, it is such a small share that companies just don't care. MS may worry about linux in server space, but could care less on desktops. For any move that may seam like something they or any other company does to counter linux can better be explained by non-linux theories. Really it's an over thinking of linux's place that hurts it. It you accept it being small and having no effect you have more the right mindset to change that. If you think it's everywhere and a big force you are blind to it's flaws and less likely to do things to improve it's place. This goes past linux and applies to so many things. People who think everyone overclocks their chips are blind to the fact everyone does not, and thus don't get the fact that the Chip makers don't care about what they do.
Other then the fact that they take something they own and modify it, there are no similarities.
As somone who grew up around muscle cars,in the 70's, and then went on to overclock almost every generation of intel processor, I feel I can speak on this issue.
People who hot rod risk there lives. Doing 180 down any street can be fatal, even in the best conditions. Ever see a car lose control at 150 MPH? I have, it aint pretty.
Ever see what happens when your computer CPU stops working? not a whole lot.
Here's something you never hear:
"Mike was overclocking is 3G to 3.75 when suddenly he blew a tire. He'll be out of the hospital in a few month."
I understand pushing the computer to it's limits, and then some. But It is not as exhilarating as driving so fast the line is solid and one flase move and your going to experience serious hurting. Thats a whole different level of commiment.
On one hand, I'm glad I don't drive like that any more, OTOH somedays I miss it.
My point is, the people arn't as similiar as people on the board seem to think.
Besides, as a kid I always felt I was getting away with something nasty when I would talk about hooker headers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Modding can be a rite of passage and learning experience before old parts are finally chucked into the bin and/or recycled.
While personally I have done very little modding byeond simple putting them together in the first place to any of the machines I use every day (added a couple of fans to one, things of that nature), I remember one time the place where a friend of mine works was throwing out all of their old machines. They stripped out all of the hard drives, and told the employees that if any of them wanted any of the machines they could take them. Well after a few days when they were about to throw them away my friend grabbed everything they had left.
Most of the boxes were old 133mz pentiums, there were a couple of 486s and a few newer machines (P3s if I remember correctly). Since they were not allowed to resell the machines or give them to anyone else, and there was no way my friend was going to use all these machines, we decided to have a little fun with them.
We did some really odd things to those machines, just trying to see what the limits were of still having a bootable machine.
The thing is, although I've always been more of a software person than a hardware person (I know enough to build a machine, replace parts, troubleshoot parts, and basically do anything a common person would need done), but I learned a lot about how the hardware works just from hanging out with my friends (most of them were electronics engineers and knew a lot more about the hardware than I did) and seeing what sort of crazy things they came up with.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I know completely what you mean.
I have a auto tech class, and much of the talk seemed similar to computer moding/repair, like how most people do not anything about the car or pc, only pay attention to the idiot lights (a big window that pops up and says "dude, you got a fuxored pc") and never open up the inside.
But modding a car is much more difficult than a PC, as due to the fact it has much more parts that can be removed, as opposed to a pc where there are many parts, but are grouped in larger chunks (video card, motherboard, cpu) and once you figure out what is wrong, you either do a software fix, or replace it as fixing the hardware is probably extremely expensive for what you would need to do (fixing a single cell of bad ram), so it would just be cheaper to go buy a new stick of RAM.
Cars on the other hand have several systems, that keep subdividing, and have many removeable parts, as if a piston ring is faulty (think of it as a little bit of the cpu) you car will either not funtcion, or not work good, if it was a cpu, you would toss it, but in a car, you would take the time to trace it to a componet and replace it.
thus, I think overclocking is wanting to be like car modding, but just cannot get the outside respect of car modding. In the long run I think cpu modding is easier (a quick trip into BIOS and maybe 10 minutes of time), but in the long run could be much more difficult (getting tech to let you modify the chips themselfs to work better and other detail modding, even replacing circuits and building faster software). So, we are kind of the next hotrodders, thats why people have lan parties you know.
as should be obvious by my username, im a muscle car guy at heart. however, youve gotta step into at least this decade. check out this 8 second awd dsm. in my opinion, 8 seconds on 2.0L and 37(!)psi is a hot rod in the true sense of the word. do you not realize that in the 50's, all the model-a guys and the 30's coupe guys hated the new-fangled chevy and ford v8s in those new hightech 50's machines. "kids these days," they said.
im sure you and i can both agree that most import guys are terrible representatives of our sport, but to say that 4 cylinders cannot be hot rods is ignorant. is it defined by the number of cylinders, where they are made, the technology, what?
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
Just make that 4000lb monster car turn. F1 cars are only 3.5L for a reason. In most parts of the world, racing involves doing something besides driving in a straight line. A 2.2L engine can deliver 400 hp for a long time; the problem is when you get to rediculous levels of HP it isn't good for a whole lot outside of a drag strip. You can't put the power down.
upon second read of your post, you admit that a boosted 2.2 vtec cant compete with a 460. it's also going to cost a hell of a lot more to build the honda motor. 4cylinders can be plenty fast, but it takes HUGE amounts of money to do it, especially with hondas.
4 cylinders means you only need 4 forged connecting rods and pistons and half the honing time. In fact, it works out cheaper to build a very fast 4cyl engine - you don't even need as big a turbo. I am just finishing a project to get 300hp from a 1600cc honda engine. The total expenditure was around $3000cdn, and that was most ly because I wanted to get a brand new turbo not a rebuilt one. That INCLUDED buying another engine to work on. There are millions of those engines and they are cheap.
You can't work on a V8 engine in your kitchen. A dismantled little 4 banger is very easy to work with. Two guys can easily pick it up. One guy can pick it up dismantled.
Do you know what insurance is on a 1600cc engine compared to a 8000cc engine?
Very few people take it this far, but there are a lot of very fast Hondas out there. It once was more expensive, but now it's very cheap to build a 12 second Honda. Cheaper if you don't care about it blowing up.
Lots and lots of people do this.
Turbo D16 has lots of pointers on how to get started on cheap turbo setups.
..don't panic
there is no such thing as a 4 cylinder hot rodders.
I disagree. Getting over 300 HP out of a 2L engine is impressive. That's like having a 440/454/460 (choose your poison) that puts out over 1100 HP when you think about it in HP/liters.
I respect anyone with a "ricer" that actually can go fast. It's the "all show, no go" cars that piss me off. The people who think that a set of subwoofers, some neon, and a fart can exhaust makes their car cool.
The "ricers" even have their own factory hot rods. Where the car guys have vehicles like the 'Stang Cobra, and the truck guys have the Lightning and SRT-10 Ram, the ricers have the Lancer Evo and the Subaru WRX STi. Both of these are fast as hell straight from the factory, and both are all wheel drive, so unlike the V8 RWD Detroit hot rods, these can turn under throttle and are easy to drive in the winter
To me, hot rod status is decided on the drag strip, not by engine size/type.
P.S. To clarify, I would prefer a nice V8 (or V10 a.k.a. Viper/Ram SRT10) RWD over a 4cyl any day.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
I'm an ex-street racer/hot rodder (my two favorite cars were a '70 Challenger whose 383 I replaced with a 440, and my factory 340 '69 Dart Swinger).
:-)
I can tell you that very few of the guys in the street racing and cruising scene came out there with girls, or even had girlfriends. A few of them were married, but they typically only came out for the cruise portions. The racing, which happened later in the evening on dark roads around the city, was attended by young, unattached males.
Think about it: if you have a girlfriend, how content is she going to be that you spend most of your time and money on your street machine, and your idea of a good time on Saturday night is going to the parking lot cruise at Mervyn's, then heading out to Kearny VIlla for racing? Most of the very few girls I met back then who thought that was fun actually had their own cars, and the cars were better than most of the guys' rides. Their owners could drive, too. The proof of this was that if a guy did get a girlfriend, he would usually become pretty scarce in the street scene after that.
Even in the seventies at Ruffin Road, where people sometimes even trailered in cars, and ones brought on a tow bar were not at all unusual, those hot summer nights were still almost exclusively male summer nights. I'd guesstimate that no more - and probably less - then ten percent of those guys had girlfriends. That's probably even worse than the Slashdot percentage
I don't know how things are now, because I'm married and have kids and that just takes precedence over fast cars and makes racing absolutely out of the question, but back in the late eighties/early nineties when I was last involved in the scene, it had mostly been taken over by riced-up Japanese cars and (far worse) lifted mini-trucks whose height above the ground was far higher than the IQs of their drivers. I bet most of those guys didn't have girlfriends either.
The fact is, most of the hot rodders and street racers have a great deal in common with overclockers (which is probably why I occassionally dabble in overclocking myself): they're technology nerds. Most of them were far more interested in cams, pistons, and going on junkyard crawls looking for cool rare parts than they were in cruising for girls. It was pretty common to turn out early Saturday morning at the Ecology yard in Otay Mesa, toolbox in hand and cash in pocket, and run into people you knew from Saturday night.
Overclockers are the new hotrodders.
All of the arguments were basically the party line: don't overclock. It's not good for your system, it's not effective, just buy a new processor (and whatever else is needed to make the "new" computer run). yeah, right.
I think he does raise some valid if incomplete points. The first is that MOST computer users do not need overclocking. What's the use of a 3 gigahertz CPU to handle word processing, where the input is usually much less than 50 words (perhaps 250 character) per minute? But he misses the point that to overclockers, it's a hobby or challenge can no more be stopped than the use of (let's say) drugs or sexual favors for money or caffeine.
Overclocking is usually done for a purpose. Gamers, for example, want performance, better performance than the latest out of the box equipment. So, they go to the internet and find the information (and that community of overclockers mentioned) to successfully push their CPU up a notch or two without killing reliability or introducing other glitches. With all the sites for mod-ing and overclocking out there, there's also notoriety.
Older computers should not be overclocked to avoid upgrading. That would be comparable to taking an engine with 150,000 miles on it, adding a turbocharger, and dropping it into a race car. It won't last long. There are enough uses for older computers (routers, mail servers, Linux workstations, etc.) that justify not upgrading.
I really look at overclocking like I still look at souping up cars - which incidentally, is as big if not bigger than ever. If you've got the money, honey, and you've got the time, it's your car. Or computer.
I think the big difference between him and me is that he's an engineer, I'm a computer user.
The difference is that overclocking is a bloody waste of time!
A car that was fast in the 80s is a car that is fast in the 90s is a car that is fast in 00s -- a computer that was fast two years ago is slow and pathetic today.
Overclockers are the new hotrodders in the same way that beta-testers are "the new test pilots".
Give me a break.
There may be some similarities, but you can crowbar any four elements into an analogy if you try hard enough.
The obvious defining difference is physical risk through use. How many overclockers put their bodies on the line testing out their modifications, hm?
A comparison to street racers is even worse, as that is a patently illegal activity everywhere in the nation - what's illegal or dangerous in the bold world of overclocking? Ooh, you're risking data loss, what big balls you have.