Overclockix 3.7 Released

prostoalex writes "Overclockix 3.7 is released, available via bittorrent. It's a live Linux CD with a bunch of utilities for 'torturing' the PC hardware, hence the name. The authors seem to take a reasonable approach on graphical desktop, cutting out what they consider unnecessary eye candy, but leaving in the tools essential for effective GUI. 'Some new package highlights such as knoppix firewall, vlc, superkaramba, KDE 3.3.1, newer 2.6.7 kernel, NX client, and many more', the site says."

Comments

Torture the computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Windows ME on there?

Re:Torture the computer?

[christopherfinke]

That would be torturing the user, not the computer.

Overclocking damage via software, Possible on PCs?

[10000000000000000000]

Do you remember the good old days? When software configuration had the power to wreak physical havoc on the machine components themselves?

ahhh, I recall a coworker telling me the other day about ancient IBM printers.

"Giant beasts!" they were described as. "Stacks of alternating row color feed paper as tall as a MAN!" he said. He was in school and was waiting in line to print out a program he held in his hands as several hundred punch cards. The woman at the front of the line inserted her cards and set the system running.

Apparently she sent some kind of malformatted instruction, because this printer (which was quite substantial in size itself - computers used to be so much more like washing machines and fridges didn't they :) slowly opened it's mechanical lid and began to shoot paper 10 feet out at amazing velocities.

It took some time for an instructor to get called in to stop the madness, and apparently a good amount of paper had been blown through by that point ¦D

anyhow, the point of my story is a question. is it still possible to wreak havoc on modern PC's via non-bios software instructions? theoretically? without any physical hardware modification?

just curious =)

So useful for Windows OC'ers

[roffles]

One of the biggest problems when overclocking is testing stability, and when you're running windows it's hard to tell just what is causing the instability. I think this will be very successful in the OC community because not only will it provide an environment to push the hardware, but it likely won't crash as randomly as windows does, won't require repartitioning to get into linux, and will probably generate more informative error messages if you push things too hard.

Re:So useful for Windows OC'ers

[toddestan]

I'm not so sure it would be so useful if you plan on running Windows. From my experience, Linux seems to be a bit more tolerant of flakey hardware, and a system that's stable in Linux may not run Windows reliably at all.

Re:Burn-In

[DNS-and-BIND]

I used to work at AMD's Austin fab. Your processor is already burned-in at the factory. Actually, we used the term to mean taking the processors and BAKING THEM IN OVENS for several days, and then returning them to our facility and testing them, where the defective ones were sorted out. I think "burning in" is just a word used by people who don't understand it properly, like "big iron" means anything larger than a Sun 220R these days.