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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!"
The Zen of Overclocking
Bob Colwell
Every once in a while, something comes along in the computer industry that really surprises me. The first time this happened was in the early 1980s, when the first personal computing stores showed up in shopping malls. The second time was when I took the first Internet browser out for a spin and found a new universe of Web sites. The third occasion was using Altavista. I'm still amazed by how well search engines work.
A new "surprise" has been gradually creeping up on me, and I don't know whether to admire it or heap scorn on it. So I'll do both, by turns. It's called overclocking--driving your computer faster than its specifications allow.
HOT RODS, MUSCLE CARS, INSANITY
In the 1950s and 1960s, one cool thing for high school or college students to do was to "soup up" their automobiles. While I wasn't personally afflicted with this particular malady, it was part of the general culture, at least in the US. The symptoms included an oversized, overpowered American car, an air scoop for the engine, a new hood with a hole for the air scoop, a wing-like deflector on the back (to keep the back end pushed against the ground while driving at supersonic speeds), replacement of the muffler with chrome pipes that resonated most alarmingly, a metallic green or blue paint job, reverb springs on the AM radio and 8-track tape player, and some kind of cheesy fire motif adorning the fenders.
In an era when pollution and fuel economy were blithely ignored, my crazy neighbor even put a nitro engine in his car so that he could leave even more rubber on the pavement than a normal overpowered V-8 allowed. If the crazy part isn't obvious yet, consider this: This beast burned fuel like a brush fire, fuel that cost three times as much as gasoline and was available from only one station in the entire city. To the extent that this assemblage was intended as a babe magnet, there is some question about the wisdom of limiting its range to a one-mile radius around a single filling station.
Why would people do this? Too much time and money on their hands is one plausible explanation, and it's at least a prerequisite for any other explanations. But there is also something to admire here--people who modify their vehicles this extensively are obviously not afraid of technology. They get their hands dirty. They want to know how things really work. They're not content to treat technology as a closed black box; in fact, they don't really trust technology that must be approached in that way. Except for their lack of parsimony, and their willingness to take naive, unjustified chances with technology, they sound like engineers.
PC TWEAKING
Overclocking has been around since the early 1990s, but it seems to be gaining popularity. I recently saw a magazine called PC Modder in my local supermarket. (Yes, not a specialty bookstore, not the local PC repair shop--the supermarket.) It has step-by-step tutorials on everything from CPU, chipset, DRAM, and video card overclocking techniques to special cooling arrangements (yes, including compressor-based refrigerators) to painting orange and red flames on the sides of the computer skins that any 1950s hot-rodder would immediately recognize. One person even installed the dashboard of a car into his PC and wired the gauges to reflect machine temperature, CPU load, and memory activity. There is actually a company that will help you perform such a tachometer modification on your PC.
Just as with hot rods, there is a community here. Hot-rodders liked the idea that they not only could rebel against what the big companies were foisting on them, they could improve on it. As they say in PC Modder, "The allure of modding is pretty elementary. If some power is good, then more power must be even better. And if you look good in the process, well, that doesn't hurt, either . [A] strong sense of community is one of the reasons modding is so much fun."
A current TV commercial starts with one guy showing off the engine of his car t
litigious bastards
suck it sco!
To get significant performance increases from modern engines, over-clocking, or rather hacking the ECM is essential. It's the only way to tweak a stock engine.