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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!"
My dad and I were talking with some friends, and I realized a huge "generation" gap.
They were telling a story about the struggle to drop an engine into a classic muscle car without a lot of room.
My dad and I countered with a story about the problems with seating some RAM in a motherboard without a lot of room.
Computer Geeks - the gearheads of the future.
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.
Very true. The muscle car dudes are thought of as masculine and manly, and are the ultimate chick magnets. They score with all the hot chicks and eventually become ultra-successful business executives.
The overclocking dudes are thought of as girly Poindexters, who if they are lucky, will have a cubicle larger than a bread box and might even move out of their mommy's basement before they turn 45 -- about the same time they lose their virginity.
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
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.
I kind of have a problem with this.
Yeah, i'll say that I could equate "ricers" with people who buy a windowd case for their celeron 1700 with onboard video. I'll give you that.
However, I always split up the overclocker-slash-hotrodder into two camps:
Muscle Cars - These people use Intel processors. Their processors are almost hopelessly inefficient, huge, expensive, not very intelligent, and run hot. However, they make it all up in raw speed (displacement / horsepower equal to clock cycles)
Street Racers - These people are the Honda crowd. They buy AMD's because they're cheaper and more intelligent. They know that the clock cycles don't mean as much when your processor isn't able to do as much with them. They value technology over raw power. However, technology only can go so far - currently, the 2.2L VTEC, even when boosted, can't compete with the 460 big block.
~Will
~Will
sig?
I've got a 6 liter v8 honda civic and a duron overclocked with nitrogen to over 5ghz, so I must have a REALLY small penis. ;-)
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
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
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.
As the owner of a 300whp turbo miata that can give most v8 cars a run for their money in a straight line, I take exception to this remark.
The cars are different, the engines are different and even the power adders are different but the goals, the mentality and the outlook on life is the same. We hate the same posers with their slow, loud, FWD shitboxes and we respect a good engineering accomplishment when we see it.
Yeah, you can't imitate the sound of a V8 with a 4 banger, that is true. But the quickly building tea-kettle sound of a turbo spinning up is great and the feeling that goes with it is like no other. In the space of half a second the car goes from feeling sort of sluggish to feeling like it has a cam with lobes the size of mount everest. The exhaust note completely disappears and is replaced with a loud whoosh. The rear tucks in and the car explodes forward with genuinely frightening speed.
Give it a try before you knock it, and dont let the riceboys get you down with their stupidity. 120 decible 4 bangers making 90 hp arent hotrods and they arent fast.
It's funny... My friends and I are into both cars and computers. I'm thinking of one friend in particular who has the fastest car in the crowd... he is also the only one among us who likes to overclock his stuff. It all started a few years ago when he had a motherboard that allowed him to set the speed with some jumper settings. He said, "Hmmm... This CPU is only supposed to go up to X mhz" (I think it was, like, 233 or something) "but let's put it on 300 and see what happens." Apparently, it worked fine, so he's been pushing his computers ever since.
Funny thing about reliability vs. performance, too: Among our group of friends, he has had the most hard drive disasters, and has also had the most transmissions break in his car (physically break--as in a loud BAM!!! from power-shifting too much). Both are mechanical systems... I wonder if there is any correlation.
On the other hand, there are programmers who don't know a screwdriver from an impact wrench, and there is the story I recently read about how new cars' computer codes frustrate mechanics. Most of these guys are purely mechanically inclined. I think there is a serious need for people in each of these two industries to familiarize themselves with the other.
Ok, that's enough rambling.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.