AMD Athlon64 4000+ Underclocking

Bios_Hakr writes "PC Stats is running an article on their experiences underclocking an AMD 4000+ processor. Their goal was to try and reduce the voltage requirements and lower the heat output. They benchmark using 3dMark01, 3dMark05, as well as SuperPi. From the article: 'This got us thinking though; what about under-clocking? Most modern processors and motherboards can just as easily run under a rated speed as it can run over... but is there a point to this? Well possibly.'"

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[Arctic Dragon]

Their next article: how to remove 2 cylinders from your Ferrari's V12 engine.

Their Maths is a little suspect in places

[kabbor]

They listed the drop in temperature from 33.5 to 26.9 as a 20% drop. However, they didn't mention the ambient temperature. If you take 20 degrees, then this drop is more like 50%. That would also mean that it was consuming well under half the power. (I'm assuming watts->degrees is exponential.)

As a secondary matter, the person who got me interested in BSD, as a rule, made his servers with whatever was the cheapest AMD-K6, underclocked to 350MHZ. Bulletproof boxes with long lifetimes. I'm sure there are still some churning out the bits around this town.

Re:Don't keep us in suspense

[The Original Yama]

I have an Athlon 2100+ which I bought back in 2002 when it was brand new. After installing it, I experienced frequent lockups as the CPU overheated under heavy loads. I bought a new heatsink/fan combo (a Thermaltake Volcano 9, which was pretty good at the time) to replace the standard AMD one, but it sounded like a jet turbine at full speed and it only alleviated the problem a little. After that, I underclocked my FSB by only 3MHz (133MHz to 130MHz) and I haven't had a lockup in over a year. The associated drop in performance is unnoticable.