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Is Overclocking Over?
MrSeb writes "Earlier this week, an ExtremeTech writer received a press release from a Romanian overclocking team that smashed a few overclocking records, including pushing Kingston's HyperX DDR3 memory to an incredible 3600MHz (at CL10). The Lab501 team did this, and their other record breakers, with the aid of liquid nitrogen which cooled the RAM down to a frosty -196C. That certainly qualifies as extreme, but is it news? Ten years ago, overclocking memory involved a certain amount of investigation, research, and risk, but in these days of super-fast RAM and manufacturer's warranties it seems a less intoxicating prospect. As it becomes increasingly difficult to justify what a person should overclock for, has the enthusiast passion for overclocking cooled off?"
Why? Because I've overc locked, so I'm faster than y'all!
Overclock your smartphone or tablet instead
For me, It's fun and I could care less what some dude did with liquid nitrogen.
First computer, I just used Asus Overclock and felt I got more for my money.
Second computer, I started fiddling with manual settings.
Third computer I pushed it until I couldn't get rid of the heat with air cooling.
Fourth and current computer, water cooled and running awesome (6 cores at 4.3 GHz).
Each time I felt the progress, it's like leveling your character, but the character is you, and the game is real life!
From a gaming perspective (typically one of the big drivers of overclocking), a few factors that might argue "yes, it's over":
1) For quite a few years now, PC games haven't been forcing the kind of upgrade cycle that they did over the previous 20 years. When Crysis appeared in 2007, it was a game that gave many people an "upgrade or don't play it choice". And after that... the industry retreated. Consoles were the primary development platforms at the time and few PC games pushed significantly past the capabilities of the consoles. Not only did we not see any games more demanding than Crysis, but the vast majority of PC games released were substantially less demanding. As a gamer, if you had a PC that could run Crysis well, you did not need an upgrade. This situation lasted 4 years.
2) Performance has become about more than clock-speeds. The main advances in PC gaming technology over the last few years have come from successive versions of directx. You can't overclock a machine with a directx 9 graphics card so that it can "do" directx10. Same goes for dx10/11.
3) As the entry barriers to PC gaming get lower, the average knowledge level of users fall. PC gaming is, in general, easier and more convenient than it has been at any time in the past. Pick up an $800 PC, grab Steam and off you go. If you just want to play games and are using an off-the-shelf PC from a big manufacturer, you don't need to worry about switching around graphics drivers, sorting out hardware conflicts or any of the other little niggles that used to make PC gaming such a "joy". You can even find cases where PC gaming is easier than console gaming; the PS3, with its incessant firmware updates and mandatory installs has taken us a long way from the "insert game and play" roots of console gaming. People who are new to PC gaming just won't be coming from the kind of mindset that even considers overclocking as something you might even remotely want to do.
4) Among "old school" PC gamers, I think there's been a growing recognition that overclocking has its downsides as well. In an economic downturn, when money is tight, you don't necessarily want to go risking a huge reduction in the lifespan of your expensive toys.
That said, there are a couple of factors that might argue the other way (closely connected to the earlier arguments):
1) System requirements are finally on the move again. After years in stasis, 2011 has seen the release of a number of games with equivalent or higher requirements than Crysis. Bulletstorm started the trend, but Battlefield 3 and - to an even greater extent - Total War: Shogun 2 have really started to push the envelope on PC hardware. A lot of developers openly admit to being bored with console hardware. Even though they still get most of their sales from the consoles, they are using the PC to push beyond what they can achieve there, both to get their studio noticed and to get themselves ready for developing for the next round of console hardware.
2) The downturn also means that people feeling a squeeze on their budgets may be looking to get as much bang for their buck in terms of performance as possible. If you think that your new, overclocked PC will last long enough that you will be able to afford a replacement when it does start to give out, then why not take the risk?
Few people have any real need to sacrifice stability for a little more speed. Overclocking is pretty pointless for anyone with a modern CPU.
It used to mean windows would run faster, games would run faster, everything was FASTER MAN!!!!!111one.
But now overclocking for the at home folks is a case of hit a button in your bios, or in some cases a physical button on the motherboard, and it'll do some overclocking for you, automatically. As its become more automated, the news worthy stuff becomes more and more expensive to implement and show off, and so most things are less news worthy and so it appears "overclocking" happens less. In reality I'd expect it happens alot more, and maybe even when people aren't fully aware of what they are doing.
Also systems being so much faster now, generally provide the speed that users require of them, unless they are the kind of users to be pushing systems to overclock simply for the hell of it, like the guys who get in the news. However you don't see these guys then gaming and getting 200fps on these systems, or anything exciting like that anymore. Its simply overclocked, and shown it to be "stable" at said speed. No one ever goes "lets see how many FPS can we get outta this baby now!", its all become very much a concept thing rather than actually running systems at these speeds for any sensible amount of time.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Look, digital electronics are still subject to analog limitations. When you overclock, you squeeze the hysterisis curve, increasing the probability that your chip incorrectly interprets its the state of a particular bit as the opposite value. i.e. you get random data corruption. This is why you eventually start crashing randomly the more you overclock.
While overclocking a chip that has been conservatively binned simply to reduce manufacturing costs but is actually stable at higher clock rates is reasonable, trying to overclock past the design limits is pretty insane if you care at all about the data integrity. Also, you tend to burn out the electronics earlier than their expected life due to increased heat stress.
I never overclock.
Ten years ago, CPU and RAM speed were really big factors in how fast your PC felt. We've spent the last ten years optimising hell out of them, while still using 7200RPM spinning disks (if you're lucky). So, surprise surprise, today disk IO is what limits your PC's performance. Why overclock your RAM? It makes (almost) not difference to your IO speed.
I got a new laptop just over three years ago. It had a 2.4GHz processor. I got my next new laptop a few weeks ago. It has a... 2.5GHz processor. Clock speeds have become almost irrelevant. What makes the new sucker fly is the SSD. Unfortunately, there is no BIOS setting, however risky, to change from disk to SSD.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
That's like saying competitive soccer going broke would impact on EVERYONE EVER from playing soccer with their friends.
Not everyone overclocks to beat a record.
Hell, "overclock" a toaster if you have to. 2 second cold toast anyone? (the best toast)
But really, there are still plenty of things you can overclock to beat records, such as what iB1 mentioned up there, overclock a smartphone or tablet.
Overclock a Beagleboard, or a Raspberry Pi when it comes out, Arduinos. All these compact computers are pretty much sitting around waiting to be hit by the overclocking spirit.
No. Next question.
Seriously though, both Intel and AMD sell multiplier-unlocked CPUs as a feature, and the winners of tests in PC Pro magazine are overclocked by the system builder. You can even buy upgrade bundles pre-overclocked. My latest motherboard came with one-click overclocking software and can adjust the clock speed through a web page while playing a game. Liquid coolers are mainstream. Overclocking is definitely not dead.
A latent existence
"has the enthusiast passion for overclocking cooled off"
Not from my 5.0Ghz Core i7 2600k anyway -- The tools have become better, the mobo are generally better built and more tolerant to punishment (some have 2 Oz copper), the power rails are a LOT more controllable than before, and in general the IC companies that make the power ICs have progressed a lot too in that time, so you can overclock easier, quicker, get better results and in general, extract quite a bit more, without nitrogen.
And, I compile distros all day, to me going from 3.8Ghz max to 5.0Ghz stable (and quiet!) is awesome; make -j10 FTW !
In the days of the 300MHz Celeron, you could overclock it to 450MHz and gain 50% improvement. That extra 150MHz represented several hundred dollars straight to Intel, which you kept in your pocket by overclocking. These days, a few percent? It's just not worth the trouble any more.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"...has the enthusiast passion for overclocking cooled off?"
That's like saying, "Do nerds no longer need a proxy for phallic measurement?" As long as there's still testosterone (even if it is minimal in some here) there'll still be people (men mostly) looking to say "We did it first!"
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
You just don't get the overclockers mentality.
Either is all part of the fun adding to the risk or you are getting the most out what you paid for and are still within stable limits.
I don't think many overclockers care about random data corruption unless they blue screen or they turn it off when they need stability.
I think CPU speed is less of an issue these days; eg Core2 onwards processors are generally "fast enough" for most users.
Compare the change in noticeable speed between a 386 and 486, or even Pentium vs Pentium 2 or 3, to today's Core2/Athlon vs Core i5/Phenom.
Most people don't notice the jump in CPU performance on modern processors.
The other traditional bottlenecks are rapidly disappearing too, eg a midrange Directx10 graphics card is good enough to play all but the most demanding games these days, and memory and disk speed and capacity are generally outpacing most people's demand.
People will still overclock for the challenge of it, but I think there's no tangible day-to-day benefit anymore.
As someone above mentioned, the real performance battle has moved to portable devices, eg how much performance can you get from a tablet or phone, given a fixed battery capacity?
... between a tiny bunch of geeks who had more money than sense. Someone should have told them that if they really wanted to play their first person shooter faster they should overclock the graphics card, not waste time on the CPU.
Yeah , I 'll get modded down for offending the high priest overclockers who read this, but really, if you spend 1000s on a special cooling system for your CPU just so it runs 25% faster so you can get even more unnoticable frames per second you really need to get out more.
In the old days when CPU speed was relatively low, every % speed increase made a big difference. Now the base speeds are so high you aren't really gonna notice the difference.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
Therefore, I rest my case.
Cheers Arthur a true friend who is missed but still there :)
All cows eat grass!
When a land based automobile broke the sound barrier, was amateur automobile racing over? When Amundsen reached the South Pole, was adventuring over? Rather than eliminating enthusiasm for these ventures, such achievements tend to make these things more popular and accessible. Hell, anyone can get into higher-end over-clocking nowadays without having to worry about it taking too much of a toll on their wallet. A few months ago I glued a PVC tube to the lower half of a stock 775 cooler and threw some dry ice in to try and see what I could get the machine too. I mightn't have clocked my RAM up to 3600MHz but it was still enjoyable seeing my old box get put on cyber-roids (also playing with the dry ice afterwards - there's a lot of fun things you can do with it ;) ). Maybe it's not a high stakes game of processor roulette anymore, but geeks tend to be experts at doing stuff "just because they can".
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
I'm in my late 20s. Fifteen years ago, in the heady days of personal computing, I spent long hours squeezing every last Kb and clock cycle out of my (underpowered) machine. It was new. It was fun. But it also crashed, and burned. These days I want things to 'just work'.
/end_thread
And mostly they do. In 2011, we are not wanting for processing power, in most any electronic device we own. Xbox, PS3, iPod Touch. People of the current gen., financially well-endowed and relatively unburdened, face the same challenge I faced, and proceed to ascertain how quickly they can prestige on CoD. The paradigm has shifted.
---
In retrospect I have unintentionally managed to blame all three of the unholy trinity for the death of power-user computing. Go subconscious, go!
[Sultry babe walks up]
"Hello, and what do you do?"
[nasal voice]
"I compile distros all day. Yes, did you know that Slackware on average compiles 20% faster than Debian for 64 bit but if I overclock my Core i7 by raising power rail voltage and tweeking the quantum flux capacitor.... hello, where are you going..hello? Hey, come back, did I mention its a 2600K? Hello?"
Don't worry those guys then convince themselves they have a better visual perception than normal people so they don't feel stupid that they paid said 1000's. Much like the audiophile who buys a massively expensive sound system. Anyone asks them the hell why, they subtly (or not so much) imply that they have a hearing range that is far in excess of your standard human, and of course a better appreciation for music anyways :)
Yep, thats one reason.
Others are its simply too expensive to do the kind of overclock you'd of done 5 years ago, for the same increase in %. I guess chip creators are getting better at running the chips at their limit already, rather than shipping them lower than they "could" go, tho I don't have any stats to back this up.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
PC's are so fast these days for our simple minds there is no longer a need to overclock.
And GET OFF MY LAWN!
Well let me dig up my test results spreadsheet from when I first got my 2500K CPU, times are in seconds to complete my task in Visual Studio 2010, first set of numbers is the system at stock clock, second set is overclocked at 5GHz, during my game development most of my day consists of building the game, loading the game and testing out changes or additions, therefore the reduction from doing that in 32s vs 21s is absolutely huge, even doing code changes that don't require a total rebuild I am waiting 3s less. It may not sound like a lot but when you are focused any time saved is very important, you can only be focused for so long.
build debug from clean 12.9 6.9
built already, go and load all effects and units 8.2 5.6
at title screen all loaded, start medium map 19.6 14.3
modify main.h build load to splash scrn 3.4 2.1
modify main.h load into medium map 31.9 20.9
modify main.h optimal load no sound, small map 16.9 10.3
running in game, modify main.h apply changes 10 6.7
average 14.7 9.5
system is 2500K, C300 SSD, 16GB memory
Not everything is about gaming, I overclocked for faster compiling cycles, and it makes a HUGE difference. And for gaming the market has long figured it out, hence the huge market for overclocking GPUs, you can get custom water blocks, heatsinks, memory coolers, all specifically for video cards. The market for overclocking GPUs dwarfs the market for overclocking CPUs in the yesteryear, people have been overclocking GPUs since they very first came out from 3dfx.
I tend to underclock more often now, to reduce power consumption on my systems. Of course, I don't play any games on my systems, so I am almost never pushing the capabilities of the hardware.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Isn't that the truth! It reminds me of people who still claim that LPs sound better than CDs even though the LP stereo system is a hack that doesn't always reproduce phase properly and the audio before its recorded on an LP has go to through a compressor first to limit the amplitude because of physical restrictions in the offset of the groove and also the high frequency response is limited because the goove simply can't be machined to undulate enough accuratly enough to reproduce them especially at 33rpm closer to the centre of the record. But hey, its analogue so it must be better, right?
-ster.
the hardware vendors devote tens of billions of dollars every year to keep up with moo re's law. this has lead to the fallacy that CPU power, ram and storage are infinite, so many of today's coders don't even bother to optimize their code.
consider initializing a 2d array in a nested loop. if you increment columns in the inner loop, the memory cache will speed you up. but a dumb mistake could increment rows instead. in that case the cache actually slows your code down dramatically.
it is wrong that few coders ever learn assembler or hardware architecture anymore. not so you can write assembly code, but so you can understand the effect that your java or perl has on the underlying hardware. the only code that ever touches the metal, after all, is machine code.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
1. People who do overclock and reap the benefits.
2. People who don't and like to moan about it.
if they really wanted to play their first person shooter faster they should overclock the graphics card, not waste time on the CPU.
I always thought they did that too?
Yeah , I 'll get modded down for offending the high priest overclockers who read this, but really, if you spend 1000s on a special cooling system for your CPU just so it runs 25% faster so you can get even more unnoticable frames per second you really need to get out more.
Maybe it's been a while since you were a kid but there's something enticing about "sticking it to the man"... robbing Intel of those few $$$ by taking a cheap CPU and running it as fast an expensive CPU. Intel (and AMD probably) know exactly what's going on and how best to make money out of it though :)
For a small proportion of the population (but, possibly, a large proportion of slashdot-ers) a PC is not a platform for doing useful work or serving entertainment, it's a source of "fun" in its own right. In past decades the people who like to play with their computers would be out in the yard, covered in oil, fiddling with a junky old car, or tuning a valve radio. Now they get their satisfaction from squeezing the last few MHz out of their PCs - whether there is any need or use for those few extra cycles, is immaterial.
And for those with a more software bent, than a hardware leaning, there's always OSS - which serves a similar purpose.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I see people asking what practical value overclocking has. Why do people tune up cars? Superchargers? They do it because they can, not because "Hey, I can reach the speed limit 5% faster". It's a hobby, something fun to do. It's not about how much you spend, or if you are going to really benefit from that 600Mhz boost. It's all about the point of view, whitewashing it as a dick waving contest, or trying to apply a practical need to it is pointless really.
Damn. Have to post as AC now or I'll undo a swag of mods.
Unless you actually logged out, your mods were undone. Simply selecting "Post Anonymously" is insufficient to protect the mods.
This misfeature should be better documented.
I see what you did there.
While "low end" chips may be conservatively binned to reduce manufacturing costs, thats really not the whole story at all.
When the highest end chips can be clocked from 3.8 to 4.5ghz and higher using the stock cpu cooler, doesnt it make you wonder why Intel/AMD do not sell any 4.5ghz versions of these chips? Its because the OEM's fuck up case cooling every single time.
If Intel sold a 4.5ghz i7, Dell would still put it into a case with horrible venting and only a single fan that has been poorly placed, and then Intel would be footing the bill for loads of warranty replacements. The reason the i7 980X's cost so much isnt just because Intel was taking advantage of performance enthusiasts irrationality.. its because the Dell's of the world fuck up cooling every single time. The sandy bridge i7's perform nearly as well but run a lot cooler so can survive the harsh conditions the OEM is going to hamstring them into, and THAT is the main reason why they are so much cheaper than the 980X's.
"His name was James Damore."
Overclocking is fun. Maybe you'll find a new new cooling method too! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16285036
Sure. That's why you do test when you overclock in order to ensure it's still stable. You should also know that sometimes the CPU is capable working faster than what it was designed because it so-happened-to-be one of those that was produced with a quality greater than expected.
Or sometimes the cpu is already at the end of it's life and you're just giving it a hand to last a little while longer, which is my case, as I have an Intel Pentium D 3.2GHz dual core. It really depends on the case.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
Nothing makes more sense than buying highly noisy cooling systems so you can overclock your CPU and GPU for getting better graphics. And the sound coming from your expensive sound card is better when you can't heard it anymore due to all the noise coming from the cooling system anyway.
Speaking as someone who was overclocking Cyrix chips and AMD K6s, I'm super-glad that now I can just run a program and have the computer overclock and stress test while I sleep. I bought a 2.8 GHz processor and it goes 3.4 GHz for no additional cost. That's a small bump, but it cost me nothing, so it's very difficult to complain. Every car is different and some are just a little better built than others and could take more tuning, and lo and behold, the car's computer is self-tuning, and tunes itself for efficiency continually. The computer ought to do the same thing. I shouldn't have to run AMD Overdrive manually, it should (optionally) do a short run every time I shut down for the night. The next generation should dynamically overclock itself at all times, monitoring onboard sensors to determine when it nears the thermal envelope of reliability.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I remember how in 1998 it was said that overclocking is dangerous and that it can kill your processor.
My dad still use nowadays my old overclocked Intel Celeron 300A. I only had to reduce the RAM usage (one bank is dead and searching for a new one is not worth it).
I overcocked my girlfriend
Sure, you stick it to Intel. But this grand gesture then means you give twice the extra money you've have spent on an equivalent out-the-box CPU to some other faceless corp who provide overclocking kit and who may be just as venal and grasping as Intel/AMD/whoever. Plus you reduce the life of your CPU. *shrug*
Actually, my hearing range is a little bit extended at high frequencies. I can tell the difference between CD quality and 96KHz/24bit.
I wish I couldn't, because I'm still paying for my sound system :-(
Yes, in fact, any decent graphics card now has overclocking options right in the settings, so that you don't have to use a third party tool that may do it wrong and confuse the driver. For nVidia, for example, you just bring up the nVidia control panel and select "Performance" -> "Device settings" from the tree and you can fiddle with the clocks and on some cards even the voltages.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm sure it's more to do with the fact that Intel do not want to advertise a CPU with a TDP of 200W.
It's costing you in power usage.
I read some recent CPU / system reviews and the increase in power consumption whilst overclocking some of the latest CPU's and GPU's is... scary.
Dad? You're on /.?
in your comment if you didn't begin the comment in the subject line.
See how annoying that is? The subject line is for a subject line, not for the beginning of your comment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have a friend who overclocks 2 of his PC's specifically for compiling duties. When it saves an extra 20% of time when compiling a Linux Kernel, then more power to ya (no pun intended of course)
..yeah.. thats it.. Intel wouldnt want to advertise and sell faster CPU's... because of a number that consumers dont understand or care about...
Are you not from earth or some shit?
"His name was James Damore."
You are right, I do not (not the OP).
I use my PC for work and fun. Recovery from a corrupted svn database, for example, could be a nightmare which is not worth 10% extra speed from an already fast CPU.
So while I can understand that one wants to overclock some PCs. I will never understand why someone would risk the corruption of personal data, unless they are of no value to you.
How old are you? Have you produced anything of value yet?
Perhaps they are content to derive £800+ from CPU's that run at a nominal 3.33GHz for now.
If you think marketing and pricing strategies are so simple, perhaps you ought to tell us more about how you could improve Intel's market position and profitability by making some simple changes to the way they do things?
I read some recent CPU / system reviews and the increase in power consumption whilst overclocking some of the latest CPU's and GPU's is... scary.
The problem with that idea is that most of the time the processor is idle and then it runs at the same 800MHz that it always did, no more, no less. There should be slightly more leakage with the slightly higher (under 10%) voltage, but the difference in temperature at idle is nonexistent. And most of the time, the computer is asleep, and using precisely the same amount of power no matter how I clock it. The TDP of my whole system is less than some graphics cards of today, so it's a non-issue for me in general.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
(see subject)
CPUs are no longer really interesting for number crunching, having been replaced by GPUs. They are also being overclocked with liquid nitrogen: 3dmark record from November '11. I bet we will see more of this kind of insanity as GPU support for all kinds of number crunching increases.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Unfortunately yes. If you had overclocked your computer, you would have made it.
I upped a Mac IIsi from 20 to 25MHz once. It was well worthwhile. In fact, that's a 20% increase - I bet you'd be hard-pressed to get a reliable 20% improvement on anything these days.
a mobile cpu switches between frequencies very fast on demand, so if you increase the top speed, it will spend less time in that state.., so for example we are comparing (40% full@1ghz 60% idle@250mhz ) vs (30%full@1.4ghz 70%idle@250mhz) . so yes, you can save power overclocking in the typical usage of a mobile device.
200W is really hard (and expensive) to cool. Not many people want to deal with a lot of loud fans or a big liquid-cooling unit, or the expense of paying for same.
The people that do can overclock the shit out of a more pedestrian CPU and take their own risks.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
How old are you? Have you produced anything of value yet?
Are you serious? For one thing, not everyone produces things of "value" (subjective) on the same computer that they overclock. Second of all, just because someone has different priorities than you doesn't mean that they're young.
No actually you subconsciously slipped into the results of overclocking: something breaks if it's not perfect!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Overclocking has become insignificant. It use to make a huge difference, but today, it is almost pointless, as you can't really notice an improvement in performance.
This is mostly due to chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD focusing on putting more cores, than on increasing the speed as they use to. You can't end up with more cores by overclocking. This also has a negative effect on the CPU markets. To digress a little, It's just like Windows XP, people have a tendancy to stick with what they have for longer and the sales reflect that. People stayed with Windows XP because it was called XP and not 2001. Otherwise people may have switched earlier. People still tend to stick with XP because Vista and Windows 7 have some major bugs in them (along with some serious privacy concerns) and people want a reliable system, with security, and privacy they can control.
Adding more coors is great, but the manufacturers have forgotten a basic rule; "If it's not broke, don't fix it". They had a good formula of increasing the speed of the processors, and everybody knew that 40 Mhz was twice as good as 20 Mhz. If that trend had continued we would be using 10 Ghz processors right now, and although it might actually be slower and less powerful than what we actually had, the result would still be more sales.
Another mistake was made in the CPU industry and Intel lead the way on it. They made identifying the right processor for end users "simpler", "easier". Wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG. It is more complicated. If you run multimedia, you get one type of processor. If you use it for gaming, you use another processor. But what happens if you do many things, and all of them with extreme needs? I do not acceopt taking a performance hit on one function only to have another one do better. Going from a 20 Mhz processor to a 40 Mhz processor was a no-brainer since it was double the speed no matter what you were doing. and it increased the demand for faster memory, and storage, etc.
The new models from the big manufacturers like Intel and AMD have a huge negative impact on many industries.
For now, yes overclocking is dead. But if the industry gets it's act together it will come back.
Supply and demand uses the concept of more demand = more supply. But if there is no supply of new technology, all the demand in the world does not help, and that is where we are today.
Where is my flying car? Where is my heads up display projected on the lense of my glasses? Why can't I buy a ticket to the moon?
There are lots of demands, but the industrial world need to get their act together and start inovating instead of simply milking the same old lame junk.
I don't overclock, nor underclock, because I want as correct data as possible. That's why I only use ECC memory and AMD.
Back in the day when computer games actually did have steep hardware requirements I used to overclock everything to its limit. BSOD was quite common after a few hours of gaming.
It's a hobby like anything else..
You don't see businesses overclocking their systems (at least I've never seen this.. ). It's something people do at home to get more enjoyment out of their purchase (which was likely the point of the purchase to begin with). Most people who are into extreme overclocking are primarily using their box for gaming.. not preparing year end financial reports for work. A little data corruption isn't the end of the world (and for the record, I've never seen that happen.. the system either works fine or is obviously unstable.. and I've _never_ seen a processor "wear out").
These days I tend to limit myself to the safe limits of the chip, just overclocking enough to get what I paid for.. but I can see the appeal.
i put my drive up to a real motor that can spin them much faster. my access times are in the 9000.
Not necessarily. Depends on whether the RAID processing is fast enough to be able to take advantage of it. And whether the data bus can handle it. And whether the overhead of having larger stripe sizes makes up for the faster speed. (IE, if your disks have 512 byte sectors, to get one sector you have to read 512 bytes from each disk, concatenate them and then extract the needed data. A single sector read takes just as long.)
I not even close to being an audiophile but even I can certainly tell the difference between CD and DVD audio of the same thing. (CD being significantly worse).
I'm assuming its because of the lower relative sample rate of CDs but its irrelevant, because it shows that CD's aren't that great, for whatever reason.
I think you're missing the point by claiming analog isn't that accurate so therefore can't sound as good. I don't think its about accuracy, as much as the way the sytstem deals with the lack of it.
The tonal 'color' that using analog technology gives to the sound is more pleasing than CD, regardless of how accurately it reproduces the original signal.
When you are single-threaded and CPU-bound, overclocking might be your only solution.
As pointed out in this article by Herb Sutter in 2005, "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" (http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm), the number of transistors has kept pace with Moore's Law, but clock frequency has not. We were on an upward climb until around 3.4 Ghz cores then we flattened-out. Overclocking is one way to get past this barrier until we have new tech. Another way is multi threaded programming. make -j10 ftw as someone said in this thread, already. lol. Or, nowadays, make -j24 wtf! Luckily gnu make is multithreaded, but after you've compiled, if your code is single-threaded then having 24 cores doesn't matter. By overclocking you can get more clock cycles from a single core.
I'm sure this is all elementary to you guys, but I haven't heard anyone say that it really depends on the application. In some cases 32 bit is preferred to 64-bit, slower cpu is preferred to faster, more cores preferred to fewer, and vice versa. What do old ladies taste like? Depends. Intel is re-releasing pentiums. Did you hear about that?
I think overclocking is a more valuable tool than ever, if you need to have extreme throughput for one thread; waiting 6 months for the industry to build you a faster core is not an option anymore. (But you should really be writing that program as multi-threaded, in the first place.)
The gamers are the Tim Allens (tooltime) of CS, in my mind. Overclocking "just because" does seem to me to be a testosterone-fueled thing, and bragging rights are part of it. But there's nothing wrong with that. That's fun and drives the tech forward in new ways. However, I also agree with the guy who "compiles distros all day"; when your test cycles are 20 minutes between each test, every extra CPU cycle/second counts and you probably don't care where you get it: from the core or from more simultaneous threads.
"200W is really hard (and expensive) to cool"
No, not really. I've got 300w LED arrays in a 30mm x 30mm package that are kept cool with nothing more complex than a copper heat sink that's been pressure-blasted with mesophase carbon pitch. Junction temps never get past +10C room temp..
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
3.8ghz.. Water cooled and runs like a dream.. It will never die to that extent. Next i7 that is 4.0ghz will be OCable to 5ghz.. and that's what we'll do. Maybe at some points the speeds will be so fast we can't possibly notice the difference in performance, but we'll still do it. long live OCing
You would probably gripe at the fact that I prefer top-posting over bottom posting, as it lets me read the latest contribution to the thread.
I also like to Capitalize Some but not all words for emphasis. I also use Bold Face and italics for the same reason.
For some reason that completely escapes me, my colleagues at Kuro5hin all regard my writing style as some manner of symptom of mental illness. While I am without a doubt mentally ill, that's not reflected in my writing style. That has more to do with having read a lot of archaic writing during my education, and having come to the conclusion at all the text decoration is more expressive than the dull tedium that passes for typography these days.
I Am Absolutely Serious.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I remember back in the hay-days of overclocking (which I would define as around 2001-2004), there was a huge sense of adventure about it all. It was still seen as somewhat dangerous, and there was a certain amount of lust about it all (geek lust, that is). Buying better coolers, tinkering around with multipliers and bus speeds, sometimes even having to make physical modifications to the chips and motherboards was the norm.
Now, unless you're a hardcore overclocker (which even back in the hay days was a small percentage), it's a matter fo clicking a check box and maybe changing a setting in the BIOS (and by changing setting, I don't mean changing multipliers, I mean setting the overclock mode). There's really not much fun, lust, or adventure about it.
I think a lot of the allure of overclocking is the challenge to see if it can be done.
CAR ANALOGY ALERT!!!
Its like squeezing an extra 2 hp out of your muscle car by modifying the exhaust or reprogramming the chip. Can you really notice the difference between 410 and 412 hp, and isn't 410 enough? No and Yes, but people cannot resist.
/ CAR ANALOGY
People like to tinker and push tech to the limits, which probably leads to progress in said tech. Overclocking of any sort will never die.
Unlike water cooling, you don't need to isolate it from the circuitry, you could just immerse your whole PC in a tank of it, say a fish tank.
It's also quite an effective feline laxative. That is, if you catch my drift.
Sorry, it has been a long time. I don't have a link.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I haven't overclocked since I bought an 1.3Ghz AMD Duron around 2002. It didn't have much headroom though to OC. I think I could only get it to around 1.4Ghz and change.
Lately I don't see much use in OCing. Chips are plenty fast enough for almost anything you throw at them today and you can buy faster chips relatively cheap in the next year or so when your current chip is becoming insufficient.
Both the Intel i5-2500k and AMD Phenom II X6 1100T sit around $200. They aren't the fastest on the market, but at around $200 they are cheap any easily fast enough to handle anything you throw at them.
It use to be that Overclocking was done to save cost of upgrading your PC. I remember owning a Celeron 300 processor and was able to overlock to 450Mhz with little effort. This was a huge cost saving versus buy a Pentium II 450mhz. Today, it makes no sense to overclock since you can't get much more speed versus buying a new cpu or motherboard. A lot of software today is dependant on multithreading, GPU, and memory versus actual clock speeds. My recent cpu hack was unclocking a Phenom III (3 core) to (4 cores). This saved my some money and provided me the same product as purchasing a quadcore.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Not sure what you are on about spending $1000 for 25% more performance. I have a cheap $22 CM212+ cooler, that's a pretty far cry from $1000. The gains are absolutely worth it, I have a 2500K that has a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, it's overclocked to 4.5 GHz, or about a 36% increase.
$22 for 36% more performance is absolutely worth it, maybe not for gaming now, but it's definitely useful for other tasks.
Personally, I do a decent amount of encoding video files, and the speed increase is absolutely time saving. I encode roughly 5-6 ~10 min. 1080P videos into H264 a day. The overclocking saves me about 45-50 minutes a day in encoding time. That's nothing to sneeze at.
Instead of buying expensive memory to overclock my RAM, I realized that I get more performance by buying more of the cheap stuff.
Overclocking CPUs require buying expensive power supplies, coolers and cases which produces a negligible improvement in my day to day task. Modern CPUs are good enough for what I need the computer for. I am fine sacrificing the 1000 watt power supply and noisy fans to play games at medium quality settings.
Fast CPU's and RAM are overrated anyways. A SSD hard drive has a much greater impact on my performance than overclocking ever will.
That tonal color is essentially just a low pass filter effect. Turn down the treble on your amp a notch and you'll get the same effect with a CD.
Before, gaining those last few MHz was a much greater percent than now. On top of that, most CPUs these days are already powerful enough to do almost all user uses.
The only real reason to do it now is just to do it, which is a good enough reason if I've ever heard one.
mostly when people say they are getting a Core i7 and are going to overclock it. I ask them why. Mind you if you are trying to squeeze every bit of life out of hardware before you absolutely have to upgrade then by all means, the worst case is you will have to upgrade a bit sooner. BTW I do have my current CPU oc'd it's only a Core 2 Duo E8400 currently oc'd to 4 ghz on air and very stable.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Inside a computer case, with other stuff creating heat as well and only so many places for the heat to go.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I disagree, at least the absolute statement you're making.
10 years ago it was possible to overlock a 300 mhz celeron to 450 mhz with just a normal cooling unit and 100% stability. The performance gains were very substantial, saving hundreds of dollars. If you didn't have a lot of cash, this was a Big Deal. I'm not into the overclocking scene anymore, but I think those days of massive gains for little investment are over. So I agree with you in the sense that overclocking to save money died long ago.
I not even close to being an audiophile but even I can certainly tell the difference between CD and DVD audio of the same thing. (CD being significantly worse).
Say what? CD is 44Ksamples/sec 16-bit PCM stereo, or about 1500Kbits/sec. DVD stereo audio is usually a Dolby Digital bitstream of 192Kbits/sec, or maybe 384Kbits/sec for 5.1 audio, and usually from a 44Ksamples/sec source. And you say CD sounds worse? Perhaps what you are hearing is the extra channels from 5.1 audio. Or maybe your amp is processing the CD audio differently, like not mixing a center channel, or not doing Dolby Stereo, or maybe even trying to do Dolby Stereo when the source material wasn't recorded with it.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I have a simple fix for you. Just turn the volume way up and wait for it to kill the rest of your hearing.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I don't know how it compares to Visual Studio but they complete builds quicker and generates faster machine code than does GCC.
The CLang command-line is mostly GCC compatible. The parser is larger Visual Studio-compatible.
It is also Open Source under a BSD-style license.
A friend gave a talk at Microsoft one day. Upon his return he told me why Windows was so slow. It turns out that all the OEMs - Dell, Gateway, HP and the like - donate hardware to Microsoft's coders so they can be certain that the next version of Windows will run cleanly on them.
To encourage these coders to actually use the donated machines, they donate the very fastest hardware they make.
I'm very strongly of the opinion that coders should use, as their regular desktop machine, the very slowest hardware that can possibly get the job done. To this day I write most of my code on an Early 2006 MacBook Pro. It has a Core Duo, not a Core 2 Duo, and so is not even 64-bit. It only has two gig of RAM and a tiny cache compared to the MacBook Pros that are available today.
This has the effect on me that I can easily tell when my own code is slow. I don't need to use a profiler to know that.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I stopped overclocking years ago. Today's CPUs are just fine compared to what we had in the 90's and early 00's.
The attitude nowadays is that we have shit to do, and if the hardware is fast enough, we move onto what it is we actually need the PC for. That's how it is with office desktops. You don't even need a high end machine to run Win 7, Office 2010, and a few proprietary business apps.
Are you not from earth or some shit?
He's from earth and knows what he's talking about. You obviously don't know what you're talking about. TDP is the OVERRIDING reason you don't see higher stock clocks out of intel products. 980Xs are expensive because Dell fucks up cooling? REALLY?!?! Go back to nursing your bong and quit posting crap about things you know nothing about.
High end components are just so damn cheap these days. Overclocking was great when you could take a $200 CPU and make it perform like a high end $800 CPU. Nowadays the $800 CPU costs $250. Anyone concerned with performance is just going to spend the extra $50. Discounting inflated hard drive prices, a top of the line PC can be had for around $600 these days.
Of course there are always some who want to push the limits, but the gain is simply not as great as it used to be.
200W is really hard (and expensive) to cool.
When you dont know what you are talking about, dont talk! Seriously...
There is a reason that gaming machines have 600W and higher power supplies.. and its not because the machine isnt drawing way the fuck over 200W, or has "hard" and "expensive" cooling solutions..
Fuck man.. video cards pull as much as 300W these days... amazingly you think that Intel cant offer a cooler for a $1000 CPU?? Intels problem is that regardless of what heat sink and fan they throw on, the OEM's stick it in a shitty case with poor ventilation. Period. Thats the fucking problem.. dont imagine problems that don't exist.. people are clocking the latest CPU's at 4.5ghz on the stock coolers.. but not in shitty dell cases.
"His name was James Damore."
overclocking was always a niche thing - it had some support from game-the-system types, but was mostly tweakers (yes, akin to meth.) it had an aspect of public self-abuse, sort of like getting a gang tatoo on your neck or face. and now, it's totally mainstream and vapid - the elements of display like leds on your fans and clear side panels are no more than a sort of meth-trailer-trash-chic.
as long as the system runs stable under full load (and over, say 48h) i still benefit pretty much of an overclocked cpu when used for 3d- or videorendering
Plenty of people have 300W video cards. Those go inside computer cases... with other stuff creating heat...
Please stop advertising your ignorance.
"His name was James Damore."
Inside a computer case, with other stuff creating heat as well and only so many places for the heat to go.
There is only one place for the heat to go.. in that tiny little space called THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE OUTSIDE THE CASE.
Plenty of people have 300W video cards.. those go inside the case... with other stuff creating heat... somehow the facts have eluded you. Talk about things that you dont know about much?
"His name was James Damore."
Unless you actually logged out, your mods were undone. Simply selecting "Post Anonymously" is insufficient to protect the mods.
This misfeature should be better documented.
Not a misfeature. In total keeping with the spirit of the rule.
I blame Theodore Roosevelt.
980Xs are expensive because Dell fucks up cooling? REALLY?!?!
Do you know the warranty request rates when they are in Dell machines? No? Thanks.
"His name was James Damore."
Pardon?
On the contrary, overclocking is rising. On the standard PC front, it used to require highest-grade components alone, difficult-to-balance cooling (I got my "hardcore" overclocking start during the 486 era - there were some heatsinks that were so heavy that they could actually damage the motherboard), a deep knowledge of settings, and the will to do something that could very well limit your stability or cause your system damage if you fouled up.
Today many items come with a minor factory overclock, and many mid+ level components come with software (Asus is notably good here) that will allow you to overclock easily from within the OS with nearly no chance of damaging your system. Even if you go to the old-fashioned way for big gains, with most motherboards, especially OC-centric boards like Asus' Republic of Gamers (debatedly the best motherboards in existence for OCing and the enthusiast feature set) line and their Sabertooth (which comes in right under RoG boards) boards, have tons of settings to help you overclock. RoG boards have specially BIOS settings if you're going to be using LN2! AMD versions even come with tools to unlock a Phenom II or Athlon processor with limited cores - with the notable exception of Intel themselves, most hardware companies now encourage you to overclock safely and would rather provide value-added features to do so. Today if you foul up with your TIM contact and your temp raises higher, unless you've gone to a level of safety-removal that isn't necessary even for the highest "home" OCs, your board/chip will shut down way before any actual damage occurs.
There are fewer "You must buy new hardware or overclock significantly to even play X" titles out, which is a good thing, but that doesn't mean people aren't overclocking. Enthusiasts who do it for the fun of it will always do so; they like to see big numbers on benchmarks and distributed-computing apps. For those who game or want more performance, they'll continue to do so because its simply a good value. In today's economic climate especially, overclocking is favored over buying ultra-expensive computing parts which have minimal games. Intel's recent pricing and performance line up for the new Sandy Bridge-E Socket 2011 processors is very telling in this regard, and I believe proves that overclocking is quite popular.
3-4 years back, at the launch of the "Core iX series" Intel diverged with their socketing and created a two-tiered system on the desktop. Socket 1156 and the associated P55/H55 chipsets were the Mainstream platform, offering Core i3, i5 and the lowest i7-8xx series. This platform had dual channel RAM and a handful of PCI-E lanes etc... The Enthusiast platform however came on Socket 1366 and X58 chipset, holding an assortment of hyperthreaded Core i7 processors, the QuickPathInterconnect (QPI), TRI-channel RAM, more PCI-E 2.0 lanes, native support for both SLI and CrossFireX multiGPU solutions (which was a big deal as during the Core 2 era and prior, you typically had a board that could do one or the other, not necessarily both) and other great features. Power users gravitated towards 1366/X58 greatly because of overclocking potential and great value. At launch, the Core i7 920 basically had all the same cores/cache/HT as the $1000+ Extreme Edition 965/975; only the speed was different. The Core i7-920 overclocked phenomenally, reaching in excess of 3.6ghz for most enthusiasts with an after-market air cooler from their 2.6ghz start point; all without having to disable hyperthreading or any other processor features! I'm personally typing this on a i7-920 OCed to 4.0ghz on air - those with lucky chips or liquid-cooling systems could reach 4.3 stable with a minor voltage increase.
This OCing performance and value made Socket 1366 popular far beyond Intel's original predictions that it would be limited primarily to workstation use; especially as prices dropped for tri-channel RAM kits and high quality X58 motherboards. Its performance overclocked easily eclipsed the mainstream
I bought the i2600k CPU because it could be overclocked. I also bought the Asus Maximus IV Extreme because it makes overclocking easy and has a lot of built-in safety features to prevent stuff from blowing up. All that said, I have never actually overclocked the system. However, the fact that I could is worth the extra money to me. To me it is important that my system is not locked down or walled in. If I want to mess with it, I can, and if I don't want to, I don't have to. I don't like the vendor making that decision for me.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
These incredibly high speeds are wonderful, and have their place.
My interests, though, are for sustainable high speeds. I want the equipment to overclock my CPU / GPU / RAM, and be able to keep it running at a high speed indefinitely. And that's part of the problem: these high speed trials require liquid nitrogen or helium, which can be rather expensive.
I am John Hurt.
13 years ago you were probably (though by no means certain) using a lower level language, so there was a vague feeling that from a software perspective, you had already done about all you could do, so tweaking the hardware was what remained.
And the scalar speed of the hardware was pretty much the one thing to change.
Nowdays you're always thinking about the software, and the hardware is presented to you as something with overflowing abundance that you're not taking full advantage of. You go to "I need threads there" or "where can I pipe/fork this?" or even less nerdy things like trying out a new compiler, before you worry about clock speed. It's not that clock speed doesn't matter sometimes, but it's just one of a great many things you have access to and some control over, so it's naturally going to be de-emphasized compared to the older days.
Then from the implementation angle of overclocking, it's less work/thinking/hacking. You simply change some very well-labeled BIOS settings, which weren't always there with your 1990s computers. And you can literally buy water cooling systems, mass produced and already fitting your processor's package, off the shelf. Your case already has (or if it doesn't, you go buy one) holes and fans in the right places. It's all completely mainstream now, where you flick the switch someone else made, rather than having to come up with your own way to get it to work.
It's not "hacking" anymore.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
the only code that ever touches the metal, after all, is machine code.
And, surprise surprise, it turns out that compilers write much better machine code than humans do--in most cases, they even optimize better than humans do.
consider initializing a 2d array in a nested loop. if you increment columns in the inner loop, the memory cache will speed you up. but a dumb mistake could increment rows instead. in that case the cache actually slows your code down dramatically.
...for a given hardware representation of a 2-dimensional array (the one used by ANSI-C, so the most popular, but not the only one possible). For some representations, your "optimization" would actually cause the problem that you're trying to avoid.
I'm sorry, but every time I see one of these complaints I feel like ripping my hair out. Premature optimization causes far more problems than it solves. There's a reason that all of the reasonable software development professionals tell you to optimize code for reading first--it turns out that only a tiny portion of your code actually matters for performance, and very few people (you're almost certainly not one of them) can tell what that code will be before they measure.
Given a limited number of hours to spend working on a project, if I can spend X hours making my code more "optimal" with no visible benefit to the end user, or spend X hours providing a cool, innovative new feature, guess which one I'll choose? If you use the software, which one do you want me to choose--something you'll never know about, or something that will make your life better?
Don't get me wrong, I think learning assembler and hardware architecture were important classes, but this nonsense about how programmers used to be real men, and real men optimize their code is getting in the way of producing more and better software engineers.
I've see a lot more traffic around core unlocking as opposed to overclocking. Most people I know don't need an extra 200Mhz, especially when most of the power for media comes from a GPU, but an extra core is oftimes still quite useful.
As with the old days where vendors sold faster chips underclocked to meet demand, many sell chips with disabled cores. In some case it's a quad-core chip that had a less-than-perfect core, and thus is a three-core chip, but in others it's just that it was cheaper to make quad-core chips and disable a core for the three-core market...
CPUs are no longer really interesting for number crunching, having been replaced by GPUs.
GPU's are only good for data parallel number crunching.
My personal opinion is that overclocking does not buy you much, other than bragging rights. Sure you can get a few more FPS, or a few hundred extra MHz out of your CPU. But does that translate into anything usable? A false edge for gaming; false because there are so many other factors that can nullify that edge such as your connection parameters. Perhaps I'm too pragmatic, but then I don't watch Jersey Shore or Kardassians or fauxlebrity shows either.
200W is really hard (and expensive) to cool.
Maybe so, but once you get up to 600W it gets much easier, apparently. I use the stock fans that came with my case and the CPU stays in the 60s Celsius running full tilt with a 6990 graphics card in the same case.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I overclocked first computers (2000-2004). I bought a budget system in parts, put it together, got online, and learned that I could make my computer even faster with a little risk and careful effort.
But then the prices of components began to fall and I stopped overclocking new rigs 2004. Why? Because a normal $30 heatsink was barely enough to keep some of the hotter processors cool without overclocking... and I was not willing to risk losing my processor for a few more FPS in Counter-Strike or whatever I was playing that month.
Fast-forward to now, I still leave my main computer on 24/7, but as a career-person, I need to save more (house, retirement, vacations to placate the lady) and spend less on utilities. I also have less time to clean the dust out of computer cases that effectively had hoovers for cooling. So where I used to go for a balance of cost, heat, and overclockability, I now look at cost, heat, and power consumption. I now take pride in being able to comfortably play modern games (though not at max settings) on a rig supported by a 260 watt power supply. I have no guilt leaving that on overnight.
Note: I never got into water-cooling. I never had the space or disposable income to mess around with the kit or the risk.
Many industrial PCs are underclocked. They have more CPU power than they need, and they need more reliability and temperature range than the consumer manufacturers provide.
The end of overclocking is coming anyway, because speed of light lag across the chip, rather than transistor switch time, is becoming the bottleneck. No amount of cooling will help with speed of light lag.
Do you know the warranty request rates when they are in Dell machines? No? Thanks.
WTF? The price of a 980X CPU has absolutely nothing to do with Dell warranty request rates.
It's extremely rare for a modern CPU to fail because of cooling problems, whether it's in a Dell or some other OEM. Modern CPUs - including the 980X - throttle down/shut off when overheated; this occurs at a threshold well below what it would take to actually damage the chip. You can run an i7 without any heatsink at all in an unventilated box and still not damage the chip. Other bad things will certainly occur, but the CPU will be fine (unless done repeatedly over a long period of time).
If Dell's shitty cooling causes a 980X to throttle, and the owner of the system returns it to Dell, the CPU doesn't get returned to intel because there's nothing wrong with it. But don't let this information stop you from continuing to grind your axe. Dell SUX!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw
Here here. Low power is the new stupid (half kidding) thing to obsess over. My most-used home computer with a UI is an Atom. In 2010 when people were drooling over how great Sandy Bridge might be, and how much kickass-per-$ the X6 Phenoms offered, I was looking for an Athlon II 240e for my server to downgrade to (eventually finding, to my joy, a 610e for sale, so that I could finally pay $130(?) for the downgrade), just so I could say I had a 45W-TPD-but-still-reasonably-powerful-for-transcoding CPU. Not that doing such things makes any sense at all, from a "green" or money-savings perspective; it's all about low wattage being the new dicksize ruler.
[Pompous English accent] "At your next dinner party, impress the all the wives by being the man with the smallest power supply."
And that's the relatively non-nerdy approach. Serious dudes are getting all excited over stuff like Raspberry Pi, etc
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
In years past those gains had real world significance, now its plain ego. I think that is the core of this discussion. Overclocking has moved almost completely into the realm of ego only.
I still overclock and nearly every PC I've ever owned has been overclocked to include an 8088 clocked up with a radio crystal back in the day (not a great idea). I was playing with water cooling and Peltiers before you could buy ANY hardware for that off the shelf too. Cut down heatsinks, PVC caps, fountain pumps, and overseas sourced Peltiers made for some really quick computers for their time! Games were fast, looked great, and I ran RC5 cracking programs to use up idle cycles for years.
Fast forward to the present. I still game but I am not quite into the really crazy high end stuff. I still use a PC for gaming almost exclusively. I no longer run programs in the background to eat up spare cycles and the cooling of my room thanks me for it. I AM running a water cooled CPU though using mostly off the shelf stuff that doesn't leak, my CPU is rock stable and not quite pushed to the edge. I upgraded my computer in the not so distant past for more speed and I'm pondering doing it again to the later SandyBridge architecture from my older i7 920 (4.1ghz). I'm also looking at the new 6core CPUs that have come out but they strip H.264 instructions apparently. :-(
Why? Well it certainly isn't gaming since right now games seems woefully poor at using multiple cores! Now I have another "hobby" and that is compressing video. I buy BluRay, rip them, and put them on my personal server for viewing on efficient Atom powered STBs (overclocked though lol). When I was doing this with a C2D running in the mid 3-4ghz range some movies like Watchmen took 8 hours or more to encode with my high settings. Now I can do a movie in 2 hours or less while still having CPU available to do other things. If I move to the more efficient CPUs produced now, and especially if x.264 supports their ENcoding instructions one day, my times will drop again as I should be able to hit close to 5ghz. At that point I'll either encode with higher settings or just enjoy that it's as fast as it's going to get. I boot from an SSD so that's quick enough. My video card is a fairly pedestrian GTX275 which might get a bump too, I'm not sure.
I have tinkered with using the GPU to encode as well. Right now my CPU alone can keep up with encoding on my GPU alone but mixing my GPU and CPU together (I found ONE package doing that and it wasn't x.264) was noticeably faster but severely limited my encoding options so I've stuck to CPU brute force. I'm hoping that with CUDA being open sourced more programs will begin using the GPU too.
I've processed A LOT of video and I do video for friends too sometimes. Being able to run tons of apps, lots of browser windows, and generally not care too much about what is and isn't running is a side benefit. I may try BF3 out but doubt it'll be so much better than UT2K4 that I'll be sold as it will likely be exponentially more difficult to play. I'd love to find more things to do with the CPU power I have and I do try to use power wisely. My server(s) are actually underclocked and sleep their drives when not being accessed, my video front-ends draw less than 15watts apiece, the PSU in this box is Silver rated and under 650watts. Rendering or compiling code would be fun but I am neither developer nor artist. Those of us who are could certainly find value in overclocking! I know a certain Apple guy who was pretty butt hurt his 8 core powerhouse costing quite a bit more than my computer couldn't encode video as quickly when he challenged me :-)
P.S. Yeah, I tinker with cars too, it's fun. I also laugh at those who talk about "shortened CPU lives" - get a clue. I have had exactly ONE CPU die and that was within the first 24 hours - warranty replaced. I've had overclocked CPU go for 5 years or more being passed down with no issue. This 920 has seen temps as high as 90C under full load for hours at a time when I had voltages too high and it's still ticking fine. My current peak is recorded as 75C. If you REALLY want to drop some heat water cool the video card, sadly these water blocks tend to be pretty custom and I don't do it since an upgrade on the video means a costly new block.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Checking the usernames on this subthread, it would appear there is a conspiracy of Ravens in here!
Yes, I've been keeping count too. This is a real statistical outlier, even for December.
(Mind you, I've seen fewer ravens on one thread -- but never more.)
When I was making a decision to upgrade my computer I came upon this observation. It goes "to really notice any performance you have to upgrade your system to be a minimum of twice as powerful." The assumption is that a lot of the performance increase is gobbled up by the system. You see, user input is put near the bottom of the CPU time hierarchy. If this is true, then going from 2.66 MHz to 3.15 Mhz (an 18% increase) is not enough of an increase to be noticeable.
"You're behaving like you have no motor control. Would you like me to help you, spazz?"
Fucking stupidest thing ever.
But the metric that matters for gaming is a lot closer to the minimum framerate, or even better "the number of seconds that the frame rate was below X". These are measures that come a lot closer to telling you whether a setup will be annoyingly or unplayably slow for a given game. They also tend to flatten the differences seen between all but the most drastic changes in hardware and overclocking, which is not good news for hardware blogs or the overclocking community - who cares if your setup has a 10% difference in average FPS if still bogs down just as often? Those metrics (finally!) become common over the past few years, but were hard or impossible to find ten or fifteen years ago. How much of the benefits seen during the "golden age" of overclocking would disappear if appropriate metrics were used instead?
This is a real statistical outlier, even for December.
True... For December, I would expect at least one white raven. Winter is coming.
Maybe people should get into retro-overclocking. How fast can you get that NeXTStation to run? Or an SGI Indy?
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
What's a high testosterone geek to do now?
I tried overclocking but did not fined the performance gain worth the effort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Audio
Not the same thing as a video DVD.
Most games today loaf on CPU, and really, games are the only place most people care about speed that intently. The real benefits come from overclocking the video card, but those are clocked very close to their maximum safe speeds these days. When it's not an uncommon thing for factory clocked cards to begin overheating, there just isn't much room to work in.
Great Intellect...
First off, for mobile devices this is a bit of a mixed bag, so lets talk about desktops. We all still have them, if you're a gamer you have a pretty nice one. Power efficiency is not something you are at all concerned about, the PSU in your rig could comfortably power a submarine.
Some of us would like to buy a $100 CPU and clock it up to compete with a $300 CPU. This used to be quite easy to do, and at that point Intel had no competition, so it was an $800 CPU, and games were quite often CPU bound.
Modern games are generally not CPU bound, they are GPU/memory bound. The good news is that you can overclock GPUs just like you can CPUs. The bad news is that you're probably only looking at a 15% overclock without losing stability and you still won't have all of the extra pipelines/shaders of the fancier card.
So...is it still practical? I still do it because I'm a tight bastard and I still enjoy gaming/fast compiles. It helps, but the rewards for doing so aren't nearly what they used to be, and sane people are far more concerned with a reliable overclock than a +2Ghz e-peen that crashes after 5 minutes.
I won't make the mistake of criticizing those who overclock. I've done it myself, with the famous "Celery" processors, SMP dual Celerons clocked to 450 megahertz. It was fun!
But if your goal is overall performance improvement, it makes hardly any sense at all. You're taking basically the fastest component in the system, and making it faster. Anybody who knows how to optimize anything should know that you optimize by speeding up the SLOWEST component first. For most machines, that's going to be the disks. Once the disks are as fast as possible, the next slowest component is the RAM. Increase the amount of it, increase the speed of it, or both. Then I'd start looking at the motherboard. Only after all that was taken care of would I start worrying about the CPU. And for that, cache is going to be far more important than clock rate.
An overclocked CPU just spends more cycles and power, waiting for the same amount of time it would have before, for data from the glacially slow RAM.
Over-clocking removes safety-margins and reduces durability. It is basically for people with big egos and small minds. And it does not even give noticeable speed advantages in most cases.
The basic misunderstanding of the over-clockers is that they think they get something equal but faster for the same price. They do not. What they get is a crappy imitation of the faster version, where they had a solid version of the normal speed device before. Stupid.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That carbon pitch is so efficient at dissipating heat that even gentle airflow provides enough heat removal.
My 300w array is in something MUCH smaller than a computer case, again with only so many places for heat to go and other stuff creating heat (power drivers.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Och aye? You might want to look for a job at Intel. They couldn't find a good way to deal with 150W or so from the late Pentium 4s, so your genius should find a well-paying job there.
Or, you know, you might be full of shit.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You seem to have a serious case of the gays for me, so let's save you some time: I'm happily heterosexual.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I'll tell you the same as the other guy, but with less snark since you're not being a dick: if you can do a better job at cooling ~150W than Intel, by all means apply for a job there.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
"full tilt"
Don't know about you, but I don't think most people want to hear fans running at full tilt.
You too are invited to get a job at Intel. Or, you know, maybe it's not so simple as you think to keep a high-wattage CPU cool.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Here's what I know:
If I'm Dell, and I buy a lot of 1,000 CPUs, I take them in OEM packaging without a warranty from the manufacturer. Why? Simply because it's cheaper that way, from start to finish.
Meanwhile, Intel has a lovely little FAQ about their processor warranties that you can amuse yourself with once get done imagining things.
Kid-proof tablet..
No
Once upon a time, manufacturers didn't care if you overclocked unless it was a warranty issue. Then they started to care as their chips were passed off as a higher grade and failed early, which they rightfully saw as damaging their reputations, so they started locking multipliers. Later, they saw a market at the top end for enthusiasts who weren't doing it to scam anyone, just get the most out of what they bought -- which resulted in things like the AMD "Black Edition" and Intel's "Extreme". All these really are is chips that haven't been speed binned because there isn't enough of a target market to justify the expense of testing them that hard.
THIS is why old-school overclocking on the desktop is dead. That, and the fact that laptops are usually designed with barely adequate cooling, so you really don't want to throw any more heat at them than they are already emitting.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Numerous issues with over clocking arise from the physics perspective. These relate to the standard methods for over clocking being both over clocking, but also "over voltaging".
1. Most current processors are operating on their edge of their lifetimes for current room temperature accelerated life. Current lifetimes for MOSFETs are targeting 10-15 years right now. This is in radical contrast to lifetimes at RT that were typical 30 years ago of 1000-10,000 years, depending. This all comes down to shrinking per Moore's Law: lifetimes monotonically decline with decreasing size. We will likely hit device lifetimes as short as 1-5 years in the not too distant future (10 years of more Moore's Law if we get that far). The point of all of this is that over voltaging now pops the transistors right into the accelerating stress regime typically used for rapid accelerated life testing - the margins of stress and lifetimes are very small now.
2. There are physical limits to how much you can over clock based on device physics. Most of the "challenges" of Moore's Law today come from bumping into these limits. Each recent radical process change in ICs in the last decade have all been about overcoming these limits that simply scaling dimension, voltage or clock rates can not fix. This includes Low-k inter metal dielectrics (transmission line capacitances), Copper metal interconnects (transmission line and gate resistances), High-k gates stacks (scaling induced gate tunneling), and High-mu/HEMT on silicon (channel mobility limits), the "Next Big Thing" after high-k. Because of these, just bumping up clocks or voltage in typical over clock fashion doesn't accomplish much in terms of performance enhancement.
In general, home computers far surpassed what most people need in terms of computing power a long time ago without any sort of overclocking. So why risk making one's system unstable or shorten its lifespan to get more of something that you don't need?
In terms of games, which are the primary application that stress a modern computer at all, they are generally long on graphics processing (and typically short on content, imho) and hence stress the graphics card far more than the CPU. Even there, it doesn't cost much to get a graphics card these days that will work just fine with modern games without overclocking.
The other interesting development in recent years has been that as chip designs hit thermal and power limits, the designs changed from vertical (higher frequencies) to horizontal (more cores). The end result has been that applications realize more performance by being design to exploit parallelism. Sure, overclocking by 10% yields benefits, but going from 4 to 6 cores is a much larger benefit.
One other observation - for most modern computers and operating systems, beefing up the storage system often does more to improve performance. Replace that HDD if your laptop with a SSD and suddenly the system is significantly better. If you are nuts (as I am) get a higher end RAID controller with multiple SATA3 HDDs and a SATA3 SSD that is used as a cache for the primary array, and you are also off to the races in terms of everyday performance.
Mind you, I've seen fewer ravens on one thread -- but never more.
Oh, how I hope some mods with a sense of humor read this!
What is the ground state of caring?
Don't know about you, but I don't think most people want to hear fans running at full tilt.
The fans aren't running full tilt, the CPU and the GPU are. But the fans are able to keep them sufficiently cool while not running full tilt. My fans are temperature controlled and the environment never gets hot enough for them to spool all the way up, even when I am running bitcoin mining or Flight Simulator.
In my system, the GPU fan is the noisiest item. The case fans are relatively quiet (because they are bigger). GPU cooling is severely limited by case design. Basically all they can do is a squirrelcage type approach. it would probably be better to just have a big fan on the back plane blowing across the GPUs, but it is hard to suddenly change case design, and until that changes GPU designers have to assume there is no external backplane cooling.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Development should be done on the most powerful hardware possible.
Testing should be done on the least powerful that's still practical.
but all we did was produce suds. now we focus on quality
I have access to materials with over 1,000 w/mK thermal conductivity. Intel does not.
And I'm quite comfortable making about $15,000 USD daily. I'd rather not work for Intel. They rejected my stuff before, they pay the price for such rejection by being disallowed access to my technology.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
TNT2-M64 for a few days. I don't even bother to try and OC anything anymore as i don't need the performance increases.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
So you have access to glass, then? I think Intel has plenty.
Glass has poor thermal conductivity. I don't think you even know what you're talking about.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
FWIW, "DVD audio" != "DVD-Audio"
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }