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Overclocking And Cooling Apple's MDD G4's
Currawong writes "At AppleTalk Australia, one of our members, unable to upgrade his production mirrored-drive-door G4 to a G5 due to software & hardware incompatibility, has instead has both over-clocked and made significant cooling modifications to his machine. He replaced most of the fans, including adding 4 ultra-quiet Verax fans, so the machine would run quieter, as well as cooler, in his studio. For those interested in how he over-clocked his machine, we've also posted his guide on how to do it."
Why settle for 25MHz when you can blaze along at 33MHz?
That's still a 33% increase though, which is a fair bit.
If you can reliably overclock a (say) 2.5GHz PIV to
3.3GHz - the same 33%, then I'd be impressed with that as well.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
It looks like a dualie, so we're talking about an extra 160 MHz here rather than 80, but still...
To me, the real value in this article is not his personal account of squeezing that relatively pitiful extra performance from the thing, but the chart detailing how to nearly double the processor speed. Of course that would be ridiculously impossible to achieve, but the point is that it makes it clear enough how to be more adventurous than this guy.
So, *why* was this a good thing to do? The only reason to overclock would be to improve performance, but the article doesn't give any before and after performance measurements.
Given that so many factors contribute to computer performance (CPU architecture, number of caches, size of caches, bus speed, memory size, disk performance, CPU frequency), often in nontrivial ways, increasing the clock speed by such a small amount is unlikely to offer any significant increase in performance.
"The noble art of losing face will one day save the human race"---Hans Blix
That's very very true. The difference between the NeXTstations and the TurboStations was amazing - same 25MHz to 33MHz speed bump. Of course, the difference between OpenStep on a 25MHz 68040 and on a Pentium 100 was even more impressive :-).