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Athlon 64 In-depth Overclocking Guide
jmke writes "Everything you ever wanted to know about Athlon 64 overclocking, and then some. If you are confused about HTT, LDT, memory dividers and relationship between these settings, then read on. This in-depth overclocking guide will show you how to get the maximum from your brand new Athlon 64 system"
Idiot would do that to this sort of NEW, EXPENSIVE hardware?
Would you overclock a Z-Series IBM server? Would you overclock a 20 4-way xeons in a cluster?
Give it a while. Its not like the MOST OF US will need that speed...
Hell, I use a 1 GHz machine and develop on a 500 MHz machine. Yeah, 500 MHz because many users are still stuck on 300's and 450's.
Hardly anyone doing professional work on a machine will overclock it. Generally it just makes your system unstable and prone to crashing and making murphey's law become a reality on your precious data. Overclocking IMHO is more for gamers that want to take out as much juice as possible from their processors, and even so, it won't make that much of a difference. Generally its just for bragging rights.
Of course the real laugher is what the overclockers do with their "extra" cycles. Nothing useful, let me assure you. At least I've never seen a claim of utility. Moore's Law has given us cycles out the wazoo, and the overclockers are just silly fools, like the guy in the cheese shop with no cheese.
You want to improve the world? Write better software. God knows there is VAST room for real improvements there, and no help from Moore's Law.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
As someone who does real-time generative audio/video processing, I have to say that oftentimes what a 2GHz machine cannot run comfortably, a 2.5GHz machine can do satisfactorily. 12FPS may not be good enough, but 15FPS may be passible. People often dismiss overclocking as something just for gamers, but in reality, it can be useful to anyone doing processor-intensive, real-time processing. I feel that some of the anti-overclocking opinions here are a bit unjustified, and more of a knee-jerk response to a loosely correlated l33t culture. The only games I play are Clan Lord and Civilization III... hardly a reason to overclock. However, for video processing, I need all the power I can get despite my modest budget.
LOL.
The kind of person who, 10 years from now, when he gets his amazing new 200,000 GHz 512 bit processor with a terabyte of RAM, will say, "How do I overclock it?"
lifetime?? the average lifetime is well beyond the time the chip is worth anything.
*Few people get lucky because they need to mark some chips at lower speed than they are truly capable and they keep certain margins on the chip timings to ensure it works.* quite a lot of people "get lucky" as you put it. on a64's you often see 300-400mhz overclocks, that's not much unless you look into the cpu prices and how they hike up at those 300-400mhz. and those run whatever test you want for 24/7.. i got a k6-2 300 that has run at 450mhz for something like 6 years or whatever year they were introduced.
overclocking is not worth it usually when you buy the machine.. but ironically.. INCREASES THE LIFETIME as you can use the chip some time longer to play games etc, comfortably.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Sort of how it happens.
There is an expected statistical distribution in power consumption as a function of speed based upon the design. The distribution of product into marketing(performance) bins is determined by competition, profitability and sales projections for each bin. If you can increase your yield of fast, low power consumption parts, you adjust your price to hit proft maximum sweet spot. Don't foprget that power consumption as a function of performance is a consideration for many customers. If you're a clever company you consider overclockers as part of the market and allow, with caveats such as warranty disclaimer, for sales to this market.
Overclockers do not hurt sales of higher end parts so AMD would be crazy to ever 'fix' the parts to prevent overclocking.
Now what's the tradeoff for overclocker?
He loses warranty.
He pays a little bit more for electricity than he would for a speed specified part.
He gets more performance for his dollar.
I would never overclock my laptop because to me, battery life is more imporrtant.
Your time is worth money, too.
That is something I never understood. Why would I want to waste a day making my computer work just as good as something i could have bought for $200 more?