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Gigabyte Board Sets Intel X79 Overclocking Record
MojoKid writes "Renowned overclocker 'Hicookie' achieved a new high clock speed on the Intel Core i7 3930K processor by cranking the chip past 5.6GHz using a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard, the first mobo in the world to achieve a mulitplier of 57x. There was a bit of a scandal with Gigabyte recently when a YouTube video showed one of its X79 boards going up in smoke. Gigabyte released a BIOS update for several of its X79 boards to prevent such incidents from happening, and there were outcries that the new F7 BIOS would ... [reduce] overclocking performance; Hicookie's achievement should erase those concerns."
A way to compile Gentoo in a reasonable amount of time.
We're long past the processor speed wars and knee-deep in appliance computing, but some people still cling to those halcyon days of hardware spec leapfrogging, when bigger numbers were always better. Partly out of a feeling of control, and partly out of nostalgia.
Obviously you're misinformed, since a gentle overclock, say a few hundred Mhz, is well within the average chip capacity, with no appreciable impact on chip lifespan compared to the gain.
Really, by the time you hit the edge of the lifetime, your chip's performance would be worth replacing anyway.
When's this going to be possible with all the cores enabled?
Why do you care? It's not your money nor your hardware. Suprisingly enough there are modern games CPU bound and not video card bound yet. Is this really any different from someone trying to get more power out of their car, despite 90HP being more than enough to travel at modern highway speeds?
5.6 GHz should be enough for anybody. also, at 1.21 GW power draw, it will take you back in time.
Are there any contests to see who can do the best job with the least resources? Or am I naive?
I wish I had mod points to spend on this one. To what address might I send an e-Beer?
thats all? amd hit 8.4 something like 6 months ago. meh. intel. always playing catch up.
Putting a fart pipe on my car won't destroy it.
Overclocking my CPU would be inviting destruction operation for fart pipe-like performance gains. Which was my point.
kills its value, and I am glad I am not the only one calling it a fart pipe
It's not your money nor your hardware.
Exactly my thoughts to the OP.
However, from the summary:
There was a bit of a scandal with Gigabyte recently when a YouTube video showed one of its X79 boards going up in smoke.
I thought that this was totally part and parcel with overclocking. Although I was never into it too much, I was pretty sure that you started at normal speeds and slowly worked up higher and higher while keeping an eye on CPU and motherboard temperatures and bits?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Overclocking rarely causes damage. If you gradually increase the speed, you'll hit the point where your computer isn't stable. However, this is well before the point where you cause permanent damage. As long as you stay reasonable (don't change voltages) you're getting a good performance gain for free. Why not get a 30% performance boost?
Actually, back in the day, it was the opposite of stupid. I bumped my old K6-III by 25%. I used it for video transcoding and a 25% increase in performance was huge. It could take a full day to do a high quality multi-pass of an hour of video. Shaving 5 or 6 hours off that was kind of a big deal. Sorry you couldn't figure out how to do it right.
If you do a gentle OC without touching the voltage, you can't damage the chip. Two things damage a CPU: Heat and Voltage. Even if it locks up, it's not going to hurt anything. I squeezed a +10% OC and an 8% under-voltage on my GPU. 10% faster at full load and runs cooler than stock settings.
fart pipes can reduce power in some cases
If you're not very careful you could end up with data corruption when transferring files and by the time you notice it, half your mp3 collection is corrupted.
However, there are easy tools to determine if your system is stable or not.
K6's were some durn flexible chips, my favorite thing was to under-clock them, some poor sap would walk in with a pentium and pocket lint to spend, heck yea I will take this used K6/2 400, clip a pin (if the target was socket 5) clock that fucker at 366, charge them a song and a dance and get called a hero for (sometimes) tripling their speed, and making a customer. (also being honest and telling them the bullshit I was about to pull helped as well)
*facepalm*
Someone's going to go well beyond 5.6ghz using the 125MHz BCLK strap.
And they won't even need 57x multiplier.
Because some of us would rather pay more to get a 30% performance boost without fiddling about trying to gauge system stability, and others of us are happy enough with the out-of-the-box stable systems that we have by default.
I've done my share of overclocking (having first overclocked a 386SX from 33MHz to 40MHz, a P100 to 120, and then some K6-2s from 300 to 350), but lately I'd rather just have a system that is both reliable and that doesn't need fucking-with.
YMMV.
Kid-proof tablet..
"However, this is well before the point where you cause permanent damage."
citation needed. Are you an electrical engineer that specialises in semi-conductor fabrication? Or are you just parroting something you heard?
It would be refreshing to see some crazy underclocks too. For example, if you ran Sandy Bridges at 500MHz they would still be quite fast and not require much cooling.
Back in the old days overclocking a K6-2 from 300 to 350 required good cooling and some luck and increasing the bus speed overclocked all of the components on the mainboard. nowadays they make CPU's to be overclocked with the K and black series.
Even with the Core2Duo series, such as the E8400 running @ 3 ghz, every single one of them ran a 3.6 ghz without a hiccup without any voltage bumps. With the Corei5 and 7 series they all run at much higher clock speeds than advertised, going to 5 Ghz is usually not feasible for the day to day person, but a 3.4 Ghz 2600k can easily hit 4 Ghz without any voltage bumps or reliability problems. That's a 600 mhz increase on all 8 cores if you count hyperthreading, or 4,800 Mhz more speed to crunch numbers with.
I was interested in this board and out of the several reviews on Newegg, several RMA and DOA stories. Too bad, I like the all black and all the pci-e and usb 3.0 slots.
The damage seems to be one of the multiphase MOSFET in the power supply that feeds the CPU blew up.
It could be an avalanche break down of some kind.
Who the hell overclocks without Prime95 (or Furmark) and a temp monitor? :)
There's not much fiddling about these days. If you're buying Intel stuff new, you really don't have much choice other than to get an unlocked multiplier - and setting a multiplier isn't exactly rocket science. If you stick to the basics (either undervolt at stock frequency or crank up the frequency at stock voltage), it should take about 10 minutes including reboots and stress testing.
AMD on the other hand might be a bit more complicated - I know I never got a stable overclock back during my Socket939 days (X2-3800+, crappy MSI board with a Northbridge fan that died after a year). I wonder if it's similarly easy there now... anyone care to chime in?
Even with older Intel systems it's not too fiddly - overclocked a Pentium Dual Core (cut down Core2Duo) based system from 2.6 to 3.4GHz a few days ago, that only took about 15 minutes. Crank FSB by 10 MHz, see if it boots, run Prime95 for 60 seconds and see where the temps plateau out... reboot, repeat. Eventually the board stopped booting (270MHz FSB) - would no longer find a boot device, so backed off to 260MHz, ran Prime95 for 10 minutes, temps under 50C with stock cooling - done.
Of course, you can try to get past the FSB block by lowering ratios for RAM speed and PCIe clock (although I'm not sure which clock ratio would correspond to my missing boot device problem), but when you stick to the basics and don't try to push the envelope all too far, overclocking really is pretty simple. And 15 minutes (including that last 10 minute run of Prime95) for a 30% performance boost (I mostly use the machine for encoding video so that I don't tie up my laptop for hours on end) is pretty decent...
My 6-year old 939 rig with a 50% overclocked Opteron 165 begs to differ. Still the most stable and reliable computer I own.
Every chip's different, and these days it's near impossible to do something stupid enough to actually break them.
H264 high profile without GPU acceleration (Handbrake) is similar. 30% overclock => multiple hours won, at least on last-gen (~IntelCore2) hardware.
Ya know, maybe its just me but I never did get the whole 'Must rule teh benches!" crap. I had a customer who would pay me to strip down his Windows installs just to get a few more FPS in the benches and i swear this guy went through so much hardware his grandma was on a skulltrail because that was the weakest hand me down he had!
But all the benchmark bragging kinda ignores what the chip makers really don't want to talk about and that is chips have been "good enough" for the vast majority for quite some time now. Thanks to the long tail of the consoles even the gamers have been able to stay with hardware for years and there just hasn't been any real "killer apps" come along in quite some time that needed a huge hardware increase which is why you see ATI pushing Eyefinity and Nvidia pushing CUDA because there just hasn't been any major need...well except for those wanting to win benches and stuff like TFA, but really how big of a niche is that?
I know I ended up getting rid of my full size notebook for a EEE E-350 netbook because i found when i'm out and about it was more than good enough for the tasks i had, and its taken nearly 5 years for the games to finally use enough CPU I'm gonna have to build the kids new triples or quads to replace their duals, so seriously what real good would you get from an aggressive OC like that besides winning some score? And are they bragging about less than 6GHz? Didn't AMD hit a record of 7 something last year at one of those OC contests? Seems a bit low to be bragging about.
Personally i'm glad things have slowed down, its nice being able to game on a $60 HD4850 and still have plenty of purty on my 1600x900 LCD, its nice not having to spend but around $100 each to upgrade the kids from Pentium Ds to AMD triples (may go with a quad, does anybody know if a 3.2GHz triple or a 2.2GHz quad would be the better route? both are the same price and I'm thinking clock will matter more, am I wrong?) and they can keep their HD4850s probably another year. So if that's your thing have fun, everybody needs a hobby, but it just seems a little pointless to me when i haven't seen a consumer app be CPU bound in ages.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Meh. None of that: AMD K6-2 300's running at 350 for years and years with perfect stability, using whatever random cooler, with months or years between planned reboots, with nothing more than a change in clock speeds: From 100x3 to 100x3.5.
Maybe I was just lucky, but it is simply my experience. As I said, YMMV.
Kid-proof tablet..
If your benchmark for stability is "I overclocked a [random thing] a few days ago and it still seems to be happy," then I don't think we really have anything discuss right now.
Let me know in a year or three how it works out.
(I've overclocked my Q6600 SLACR and had it appear to be stable for a few days, but then the crashes came. Much tweaking and posturing later, I've found that I'm far happier with a slower system that does not crash than I am with a fast system that sometimes crashes: I want my systems to have planned uptimes of years, if possible -- not mere days or weeks. And at stock clocks, the Q6600 simply has not crashed. YMMV.)
Kid-proof tablet..
My indicator for stability is that the machine has been running 24/7 at full tilt (encoding video via Handbrake) for about a week now... I've never seen an unstable system do that :)
Is the crashing system prime-stable? If not, it's just overclocked too far, or not getting enough voltage... or the motherboard is having problems coping... or the power supply isn't up to snuff... there's lots of possible causes.
I'll reply to this in a year or so with the amount of crashes I've had... ;)
Your Handbrake benchmark is impressive. It makes me ponder whether I should investigate overclocking modern-ish CPUs more than I have been.
But meanwhile (again), I've really enjoyed stability: Plug it together, configure it to spec, and it just works. It's very nice in ways that weren't always common, when a random ISA card might be unhappy with the bus speed of a (stock) 10MHz XT, or when dealing with the various hairy tribulations of VLB.
As to your future report: Please do, in a year or so -- by all means. I'll be very interested in what you've found by that time (this /. article will be long closed by then, but my email address will be the same). We can continue the discussion when you've got something long(ish)-term to report..
Kid-proof tablet..
To be honest: If this were a mission-critical machine, I wouldn't be overclocking it either. Then again, if it was mission-critical, it'd be a Thinkpad or Thinkstation with next-business-day on-site support, and those generally aren't overclockable in the first place ;)
For my day to day work machines, I agree 100%: Stability, longevity of components, low power usage and a general sense of a lack of risk are just too good to pass up.
Then again, I've had many non-overclocked systems exhibit instability too... currently my Thinkpad X200 is making me a bit doubtful, because it's freezing (really full-on freezing) in the occasional Starcraft 2 bout - it's almost definitely Intel's graphics driver that's causing it (and it only happens on one single map), but even though I can just avoid that specific map and that specific game, it's causing some trust issues - what if the machine starts freezing in $VideoAcceleratedApplicationX 3 months from now? Yes, I know, Intel has never had decent support for games in their drivers yadda yadda, but full-on freezes (with looping sound and whatnot) are just not allowed in this day and age.
Even worse: With overclocking instability, I could fix the problem myself by clocking down to stock... here I'm fucked unless Intel decides to fix their driver - unlikely considering the last driver release was from about 1.5 years ago.
Sorta puts things in perspective :(
Overclocking can be beneficial and safe, if you invest in good cooling and a reliable PSU. Details: My main rig has been sitting overclocked (prime95 & furmark stable) 24/7 from late 2009 CPU overclock - 30% (original speed 2800MHz, ran at 3500MHz, BUS overclock - from 266MHz to 400MHz), overall CPU temp rarely goes above 40C - 42C under load, even with this 'crazy' clocking, and a slight over voltage as well. Here is a screenshot of EVEREST's Overclock tab So my point is moderate OC wih proper cooling can be quite useful even for 24/7 systems, with proper cooling of course. Also most new CPU and GPU processors use some kind of dynamic under and slight overclocking, especially true for mobile cpu, so it is not "st000pid" if you do it the right way. It's just squeezing more performance out of the hardware you already have, without risking any short term or long term damages. -Just my 2 cents
The average person has a desktop computer that fills with dust over its lifetime. So, if you can overclock your own computer then more power to you, but don't overclock somebody elses. Theirs will have gradually rising temps, and they probably wont be aware of it until something fails.
Previously, when multi-processing (and multi-threaded) applications weren't that well developed, it was hard to parallelize applications, and in that scenario, it made perfect sense to try and drive the frequencies as high as possible. But all Intel chips since the Pentium and all AMD chips since the Phlenom, Opterons and Turons have been doing better in having multiple cores, while on the OS side of things, every OS, whether it's Windows NT based OSs like XP, Vista, 7 or 8, or Unix's like OS-X, BSD, Solaris or Linux - all of them have improved support for multiple threads & processes, and that's what a lot of the applications have been using. Like in a browser, each of your tabs is a different process, and could theoretically be handled by different CPUs. And they could use unified or distributed memory, as needed.
So given these advances, it makes more sense to make simpler, smaller & cheaper cores, and then pack more of them on a CPU, be it 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8. And if one could gain more performance by adding a core, it makes a lot more sense to do it that way than to try pumping up the MHz. In fact, I'd say that there is a case for slowing down the MHz and extending the life of the CPU, as well as saving power that way. For a manufacturer, it's even better since they get to use lower bin chips that would normally be discarded, but are perfectly good for use in low end boxes.
Such a small overclock will also have no appreciable impact on performance, either, outside of benchmarks.
Things are still like that - try downloading a Linux DVD (4 Gigabytes) at 107K/second (10Mbit broadband). That can take the best part of day (18 hours). With 350K/second (50 Mbit broadband), that only takes an afternoon (6 hours).
Most of us (at least on Slashdot) don't picture the ideal computing experience as Apple slapping our ass and calling us a good girl as it does us from behind.
Yes we like control. Only reason I don't overclock is because it's destructive and my CPU is good enough (I think an i7 940 is "good enough"), but if I want a performance boost when my computer is close to needing an overhaul I might go for it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
are there linux equivalents for furmark and prime95? I'm mainly interested in furmark. I have all sorts of ways to test memory and cpu stability in linux.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
That is why i added copper heatsinks to the MOSFETs on my motherboard... Granted I'm running a 125W 1055T X6 in a 95W compatable motherboard. I under volt-ed the X6 down to the 95W 1055T levels and all has been good for the past 9 months many many chrome compiles, and libx264 encodes later. In fact those are about the only things that get the temps and the CPU fan speeds up.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Oooof, that's a very good question. It's not like there's many games with hardcore graphics to stress test with either...
Install Windows? :p
What you are describing is pretty much exactly what AMD has done with the E-350 which as the owner of a EEE with one I can say is quite nice. Bobcat is a simpler dual core paired with an 80 stream Radeon GPU to share the load and it lets me get 6 hours watching 720p video and closer to 7 if i'm just surfing.
That doesn't help me decide which is the better path for the kids though. they play games like L.A. Noir and the new Star Wars MMO and are needing more horse than their Pentium Ds can give them but i have two chips nearly the exact same price. on the one hand the Phenom X4 9500 which is a 2.2GHz quad, on the other the Athlon X3 455 which is a 3.3GHz triple. The question becomes which would be better in the long run, a lower clocked X4 or a higher clocked X3? Since I don't have either game i have NO clue whether they benefit from more MHz or from more cores, does anybody play these games and can give me a hand? My gut says that gaming would probably benefit more from raw speed than having a fourth core but then again I don't play PVP MMOs but i heard they benefit from more cores. Either way what they get will probably have to last them a good 3 years so i'd hate to flip a quarter and make the wrong call. Any suggestions?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's briefly interesting that they can hit such numbers with LN2, but I fail to see much value in the exercise. To the best of my knowledge, increasing the core multiplier doesn't have any impact on the motherboard, it's all internal to the CPU. As long as the board's power circuitry can deliver enough voltage, you just need to dissipate the heat, hence the LN2. You could replicate this on a $100 board, as long as it's not a Biostar.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I think you might want to revise your working-out. You're kinda dropping a zero here and there.
The reason you can overclock without raising the voltage is that there is a voltage "guard band," which is like a safety margin. Some of my research has been about finding ways of reducing that guard band, because it's wasted energy. But that guard band is there for a good reason. Typically the critical paths in the chip (those with the longest propagation delay, which limit the safe clock speed) are a bit faster than the clock period. But that's only true whe the voltage is stable. If the voltage droops, then the propagation delay of those paths will increase, possibly too much, and you get incorrect computation. Voltage droops occur when circuits suddenly start switching a lot, demanding more current, or in other words, the effective impedence of the circuit drops, and by V=IR, for the current being supplied by the voltage regulator at that instant, the voltage inside the chip will drop. The regulator cannot respond instantly, so a guard band is provided so that the maximum droop never brings the instantaneous voltage below a certain margin. If you overclock without raising voltage, then your CPU will work fine most of the time, but certain workloads will cause wide swings in current demand, and if you execute one of those, you may crash your system.
This is why memory tests are worthless for stability testing, because due to cache miss latency, the current demand is relatively low and stable. Prime number generators are also not so great, because their current demand is relatively high and stable. I know that some of the SPEC and PARSEC benchmarks have some wild behavior, like FFT, for instance, or anything that has a lot of barrier synchronization. For the regular user, what's likely going to happen is that you'll get random such events where variation in cache hits and vector computation phases will cause significant spikes in current, and your game will crash.
Okay, recreational air/water cooling overclocks? I can dig that.
They're sustainable overclocks, something you can run the system at every day.
Throwing a liquid nitrogen pot on top of the CPU and getting some stupid-high speed while destroying the chip, the board, and most of the components?
Yeah. Not sustainable, and not impressive beyond a half second or so of "gee whiz".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...if it still puts HPAs on hard drives without warning and offers no way to permanently disable this behavior, I don't care if it runs twice as fast as everything else on the market and mixes me a drink at the same time while cooking me a gourmet dinner, I don't want it even if it's free.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Given the choice of those two chips I would go for the x3 (assuming there are no plans to overclock). Three cores at 3.3GHz are going to beat two cores of the same architecture at 2.2GHz in pretty much any workload. Add that to the fact that afaict the athlon in question is a newer and better architecture than the phenom in question and I really see no reason to go for the x4. Generally you should only start looking to more cores after you hit the point of diminishing returns in speed of individual cores.
Though i'd suggest taking a look at intel's offerings too. The i3-2100 seems to be similar in price and afaict it's better than either of those chips (with hyperthreading and better architecture more than making up for the lower core count and slightly lower clockspeed). This will depend a bit on what pricing is like where you live though.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
you might not know there are companies that make a living providing pre over clocked and water cooled SR 2 based bundles for traders where pure IPC is what is required.
Dunno about furmark (never heard about it) but there's an equivalent to Prime95 called mprime, also on the mersenne download page. Same torture effect on the CPU AFAICT.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
looks like it took out a Fire Emitting Transistor in the power supply section of the board...
Good times, seeing what happens when you let out the Magic Smoke.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
My FX-8150 ran torture tests under Linux (mprime) at 4.2GHz on all cores just with improved cooling (Noctua NH-D14), without raising the voltage. With slightly higher voltage is does 4.5GHz flat out (all 8 cores, no turbo, no throttling.) I have ECC RAM and VT-d and for this kind of performance I'd have to pay at least $2k for motherboard plus Xeon/Opteron CPU as opposed to $500. Yes It took a couple hours of testing to figure out the limits of the system but it was fun.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
There have been reports about degraded or dead CPUs after overclocking but it only happens after severe overclocking/overvolting. Overclocked CPUs run stable for years as long as you keep it reasonable and keep the temperature down.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Scandal, huh? You're overclocking to the point that you need liquid nitrogen to cool the processor, then the mobo fails and something smokes and this is a "scandal?"
I guess that's why a lot of people are happy with doing their computing on tablets and phones.
;) ).
As for me, my laptop's CPU and HDD still aren't fast enough to do my work stuff as fast as I'd like. Judging from the task manager, the CPU is the bottleneck for the compiling and the HDD is the bottleneck for the packaging part, and CPU+HDD for various tortoisesvn[1] stuff. And it doesn't have enough memory (firefox, chrome, email, IM, multiple visual studio instances, remote desktop, putty, etc it all adds up, good thing I don't need to run skype too- the last time I used it it was quite resource intensive)...
I think other slashdotters would also find performance not as good as they like (even ignoring those trying to brute-force AES-256 or stuff like that
[1] tortoisegit, bazaar, mercurial weren't as good on windows when we started.
I picture you giggling to yourself as you typed this, idly scratching your neckbeard and staring doe-eyed at the Linus Torvalds poster on your wall. You don't have control in your life, so you seek it in computers. It's textbook. You need to justify the time you invest, so you feel compelled to tweak things and to invent evil enemies to fight against like Apple so that you feel like a freedom fighter from one of your favorite animes and not just the 1,153,867th nerd on Slashdot, named "GameboyRMH."
You're a relic. Suffering from Early Onset Crotchety Syndrome, you stand in the corner with your arms crossed, grumbling at the popular things while everyone else has fun.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Appliance computing is great for many people, but some of us are still pushing. As a CNC programmer I'm often waiting several minutes for a toolpath to generate or verify before I can move on to the the next step of my job. Yes, multicore CPUs and multi-threaded processing help, but some things simply need to be calculated sequentially and that is often the case with machining toolpaths. I could have hundreds or thousands of cores and my toolpaths would not generate any faster; I am for the most part limited by the power and speed of one or two cores no matter how many I have. If I can make that core run 20% faster that can be financially significant. So why not just pay more for a faster system you ask? Well if I did, why couldn't I overclock that one?
Computing speed must have reached the level where you rarely wait for your CPU. I however still spend several minutes every hour on the job waiting for my CPU. You say you'd rather pay more to get your 30% speed boost. That's fine, but what if I want to take that 30% faster system and overclock it? No matter how fast a system you buy for however much money, you can still tweak a little more out of it, and when time is money speed pays.
Wrong on all points except the giggling and the fact that I watch anime.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm sure they have better tools for checking stability than Prime95 and Furmark though :D
Are you talking about traders as in... stocks?
That's a good point many people tend to forget... myself included. Overclocking is fun, especially if you start seeing the benefits quickly. Overclocking a graphics card that's just on the verge of making your game playable... and then having the game run butter-smooth afterwards. Or seeing 3 hours shaved off of your 12 hour encoding time... :)
The intensity of the insults behind your post makes you should like an Apple shill. Just saying...
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Thanks for the advice but I won't buy Intel after it came out that they were rigging the compiler and bribing OEMs. i know in the end what i do will have little effect but I prefer to stick by my principles. that said even if for the sake of argument i would buy Intel the i series is a really bad deal, I've just looked up the chip in question and you are talking nearly DOUBLE the price compared to the AMD triple, in fact i could get them an unlocked quad for cheaper, and the boards and nearly 40% higher. if I were to do as you suggest it would add nearly $140 to the cost of the build which is just too damned high when we are talking two kids needing boxes.
Anyway I figure I'll go for the triples and who knows? maybe I'll get lucky and they'll be able to be unlocked down the line. The two boards I already have I don't think have core unlocker but we'll see and by using already bought and paid for boards all I'll have to supply is the chip and RAM which should cut the cost of upgrading both kids to around $100 a piece, then i can take their old Pentium D boards and RAM and slap them in a couple of old cases and get most of that back if not a little profit and use that to add more RAM which in the end will probably benefit the kids for gaming more than a fourth core anyway.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm not an Apple shill. I'm just anti-neckbeard. Slashdot has become the most out-of-touch tech community on the internet. Note how you had no problem with his post, but when I respond with the same kind of snark, suddenly there's an issue.
"Sufferin' succotash."
A bit dated, but...
http://www.bitwizard.nl/sig11/
Short answer: Build Linux Kernels. Lots of them.
There's also something to be said for md5sum of large files. And memtest86. And recently I noticed a rare southbridgeRAM bug that flipped 1 bit every 500GB or so of data read in. That was hell to isolate! Turned out the RAM was not performing to spec.
Slashdot has become the most out-of-touch tech community on the internet
Well that's debatable... But some of us consider that part of the fun :D
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
my undervolted AMD 125W 1055T X6 already does 480P video at ~60FPS in H264 level 4.1 high profile using libx264 and the ffmpeg lossless_slower profile with dual (5.1 and downmixed 2.0) AAC audio tracks.
I don't have any 720P or 1080P source to try out. I guess i could grab a random youtube video to try out.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
hmm good idea... although the little 2.5" 250GB drive in here is 2 partitions already, a little /boot and a rest of the drive lvm one. Also that would then cost me a windows license....
There is Unigine Tropics/Heaven/etc demos, but my understanding is that they(games) don't stress the GPU like furmark. Maybe someone could write a openCL app that does.
(before you ask there is a server that serves up all the media on the network as well, and the 250GB drive was a cost thing on this build as the build came with new drives for the server)
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Right, like I said all sorts of ways to stress disks, memory, network cards, and CPUs in linux, but no good way to do GPUs. Maybe there is an openCL app that does.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Clearly you missed the point. The OP was saying Intel was significantly behind (5.6 GHz vs 8.4 GHz). I was showing how that was clearly not the case, not that Intel has better records. Never even hinted at such a thing.
Go ahead and try two-pass high profile 1080p... encoding for mobile phones is fast on my setup too, and I only have two CPU cores :p
It sounds like you need to be looking at one of the A series quads if you are gonna try to do compiling and other heavy lifting on a mobile device like that. The A series turbo core will speed up when you aren't slamming all four cores and they will hold 8Gb-16Gb of RAM depending on the model and as someone who put 8gb of RAM in a EEE E-350 netbook I can say having THAT much RAM in a portable? Nice. in my case superfetch loads ALL my apps straight into RAM so the HDD can stay parked which adds nearly another 40 minutes on the battery. But unless you have piles of money to go for one of those insane gaming laptops your best bet would probably be an A series or even a Phenom II quad if you found one at the right price. my oldest got a Phenom II quad laptop and frankly loves the hell out of it, never slows down no matter how much he throws at it and it even games pretty well.
But why are you trying to do all of that on a portable anyway? Talk about trying to pull a boat with a Pinto! Nowadays if you shop around you can build yourself a frankly insane desktop for around $500, I'd personally slap a Thuban 6 core (the 95w version can be had for around $134) with 8Gb of DDR 3 and whatever 1Tb you could get the best deal on and save the mobile for surfing and media. If you need access on the road you can always remote in and still have much better performance than you'd ever get out of a mobile. Laptops simply aren't made for maximum performance, at best you have a balancing act between power usage and raw horses.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But why are you trying to do all of that on a portable anyway?
Coz that's what the company provides. Seems like almost everyone is on laptops here.
Anyway, I recently created a development environment in a virtual machine on a server, and compiling and building there is actually faster than on my laptop. So I might start to do development on that more often.
I'm tempted to buy a 256GB SSD for my work laptop, out of my own pocket. But that's more for fun than need :).
Why so big? If its a work laptop I'd be looking at one of the 60Gb models, especially if you are doing the heavy lifting on a server. I have to admit I've been tempted to pick up one for my little EEE (the 1215B model great little unit if you know anybody that needs an ultra portable cheap) just to see how much performance I can squeeze out of her but frankly i'm already getting 6 hours plus on a battery when watching HD video and I can tack over an hour onto that if i'm using ExpressGate instead of Win 7 HP so it would probably be overkill. I'm really impressed with the little EEE though, it actually has enough kick I'm using it for music editing in Audacity and a drummer in a box (hell of a lot better than dealing with a metronome IMHO) using hydrogen and she never lags so i'm just amazed.
But if you need it for work and they won't cough up a decent system i'd look into getting one of the quad AMD laptops for myself and then just taking it off as a work expense. I mean if my oldest can PVP in the new Star wars MMO with his and not lag i'm sure it'll do something as trivial as you know, work ;-)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.