"Fastest PC in the World" Runs Athlon at 800MHz

Errant Knyght writes "Not sure if it is true, but if it is...I want one." The Tom's Hardware writeup seems believable; lots of specs, pictures, even ordering info. KryoTech, the company that makes it, puts a refrigeration unit under the PC case and cools the uP to -36 degrees C before it fires up the rest of the unit. Looks like fun.

Comments

Re:Kryotech's cooling system

[Anonymous Coward]

Living in South Carolina I resent that remark, I also admit that it is most likely true, but I resent it none the less.

ermm... can you say false?

[Machupo]

check out www.hardwarecentral.com one of the guys there built a 1Ghz PIII a long time ago...

Re:Fast gets slower every few months

[Thomas Charron]

Last I read the page:

http://www.accsdata.com/drffreeze/Dr%20Ffreeze.h tm

He didn't get all THAT much of a speed improvment, and with MANY drawbacks.. Water was condensing on the cooler, and dropping into the oil, right onto the board.. ;-P

Also check out:

http://www.wizard.com/users/scfoster/public_html /

Looks MUCH more promising..

CISC faster than RISC at the same clock speed???!?

[brokeninside]

CISC architectures have generally also outperformed RISC architectures at the same clock speed.

Then I'm confused as to why a PowerPC (take your pick as to which one, 604e, G4 or G4) runs photoshop much faster than an identically clocked Pentium (of any variety).

I'm also confused as to why SGI's outperform virtually everything (except maybe for Alpha's) with 250Mhz MIPS chips.

It seems to me that most RISC architectures actually do more per clock cycle than most CISC architectures. They may have fewer instructions, but they can stack more of them in the pipeline at one time

Re:Kryotech's cooling system

[Anonymous Coward]

Living in north carolina, I feel obligated to back up the remark... :)

Re:Jeez

[hernick]

Two things.

Current processor manufacturing technology can go 20% to 40% faster when cooled at about -25dgC. That increase in speed is not linked to the heat dissipation. If you take a processor that dissipates be it a quarter of a watt, and cool it dows to -25dgC, then it will be able to go 20%-40% faster.

You don't HAVE to cool down the Athlon to ludicrously low temperatures. But if you do, it'll go faster. If you cool your G4, it'll go faster.

So, perhaps the PPC works smarter... But last time I checked, it was lagging pretty far behind the Athlon and even the Pentium III in performance, while being more expensive and needing proprietary, expensive components to support it... The G4 isn't a smart choice :)

Re:For video games, duh...

[NovaX]

For games, even then no. Sure, I agree the CPU makes a big performance change. I never said I/O was what was needed, I just said you try to fix what bottlenecks you have.

Here's the deal with gamers. First, the CPU used to get a major hit because the graphics cards offloaded the work to them. Now the cards take more for their part, freeing the cpu, and making things faster. The CPU also tries to fix some of these things with SIMD instructions. Unfortunately, x86's architecture makes SIMD instructions less powerful, and they don't do to much. AltiVec is SIMD, and it should be amazing.

Another lag was the system bus, as it got clogged with to much data and slowed things down. We went to 100mhz, and on socket-7, there was a huge boost. The cpu was fed quicker, cache made a big performance gain again, and so on. Now we have a 200mhz bus, and rising, plus a 100 / 133 mhz ram bus, so we can forget about this lag. The CPU shouldn't be starving.

But sure, the cpu has work to do. It wasn't the only lag, though. And as I said, 50mhz is ~ 5% of a performance gain. Maybe that's not exactly true, as it will change with clock speeds where 50 means nothing. If you look at the benchmarks for the Athlon and P3, its currently accurate. Maybe we get 20-30 % gain with the CPU, which is nice. If the CPU isn't starved, but can't handle the data quick enough, this is very useful. But is the CPU overburndened? I don't believe so, and do you really get a 20-30 % performance gain? I doubt it.

If the CPU starved, then upping its speed shouldn't help. It would crunch a bit faster, but nothing to outstanding. The celeron chips seemingly defy this, as they have small caches that run at clock speed. They also have a slower system bus (66mhz), so the cache is always filled. Increasing the cache's input means they get to work on more data - thus they were starved and you merely feed them quicker. A celeron at the same speed of a Pentium IIx can be equal in gaming, if we neglect SIMDs. I'd reckon if you o/c a cpu with backside cache, like P-II/III or a K7, it wouldn't make as great a gain, just like increasing the system bus for a slot was less useful then a socketted system.

In anycase, I merely just wanted to try to get people to remember you upgrade to kill bottlenecks, not so you can spend money uselessly and for a week have a bigger ego. The $350 could be better spend elsewhere for most potential buyers, and you never know if your next system will work wih there case. To top it off, Quake3 for Linux should have SMP capabilities, so I'd much rather spend my money on a second CPU then on a small little case with a refrigurator in it, if others games do the same.

Again.. the point is, you attack bottlenecks for your needs. I don't see this as a good stratigy because it might not be transferable to a new system. But like I said, for me my problem was IO/clogged bus (P5-200), and I solved it. Not everyone who whoo'd and lusted after the cooler were Quake kiddies...

Re:900 mHZ

[IanCarlson]

(b). Your mac was sheilded, since it was FCC approved. RF doesn't leak from sheilded boxes.

*Errrrrrnt!*

The only way to truly eliminate RF from leaking out of a box it to throw $10,000 into TEMPEST grade casing which protects against RF leakage.

The reason someone would want to blow $10,000 on something as goofy as that lies in a method of snooping using a Van Eck Reciever. A Van Eck Reciever is used to collect pulses coming from your computer (or its monitor) and displays them on a screen or in another readable/recordable format.

Obviously, this could be hazardous to national security when every Tom, Dick, and Harry can set up a Van Eck snooper. Right now, this has yet to happen, but when it does, TEMPEST grade cases will be seen everywhere.

The FCC rating simply means that a device will not cause unwanted interference with another device. The Van Eck device looks for that interference, and if you're in range, finds it.

I would suggest the Slashdotters out there perform this test: Take an old monitor (I know you have a few) and place it near a TV. Use a program to put up some colors/lines/shapes on the screen and tune to channel 1, 2, or 3. You should be able to make out a faint outline of what's on the screen next to you.

Cheerio!

Re:CISC faster than RISC at the same clock speed??

[Curt]

I have to agree with brokeninside here. More instructions is irrelevent. CISC to RISC invloves a little more than throwing out several instructions, too, at least on the PPC...

The anonymus coward who calls me an idiot (or maybe he was referring to the CISC is faster guy?) has no proof whatsoever. What can you expect from an anonymuus coward? Why are they even allowed to post?

Core based design apporach... Multiple core based design approach maybe? I dunno, thats how they refer to it... Several cores, in essence, the many different parts, (integer 2x, fpu, altivec.. whatnot.. It mainly to do with the partial separation of them that allows them to do several instructions of different sizes...

First time I've heard someone oppose RISC. Heh.

Full PPC processor lineup: 601, 603, 603e, 604, 604e, 745, 750, 755, 7400.

601 is the G1, the first PPC... 603's were the low end G2's, 604's the high end G2's. 7xx is the G3, 745's are the new low power ones, 750 were the first G3's and 755 are the standard newer ones. 7400 is the mother of all PPC's the G4.

All are RISC. All able to compete (or outo in 2D) with much higher MHz Pentiums.

Although 4 gigaflops is the very highest - the minimum of 1 billion ops is the real measurement I guess. =) Much higher than Intel's 600million max theoretical. Sure that alitvec makes the max ridiculously high - but even the minimum is much higher...

AltiVec is not like MMX or 3dnow mostly for one reason. You rename a few instructions, press recompile in CodeWarrior, and ding it's AltiVec enhanced. Now tell me how to rewrite a whole program for MMX?

brokeninside also demonstrated something else. That SGI MIPS chip being very low MHz outdoes Px's. MHz is no longer a viable measurement except for similar architectures (if at all). And PPC is definately not like the pentium architecture...

This may not matter by 2001... IA-64 vs. G4 and in a few months later G5. IA-64 starting at roughly 800MHz, sources have said. Now what will G4's or G5's be by that time?? If they double in two years... oh 1+ GHz. Geez oh well.

-Curt

Re:Jeez

[Davorama]

I was nodding along with you up till that last comment. While you are technically correct about Apple's G4 product not on the top of the heap in a bang/buck sence, you are totally discouting the new IBM mobo that is coming out and the new systems that will be based on that. You should at least tack on a 'yet' to the end of that statement. It's just FUD flamebait without one.

Re:900 mHZ

[Anonymous Coward]

You think thats funny? Where I work, Xenix 286 is still in production use.

Re:Jeez

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we know that CHRP will support G4's? IBM doesn't make them, and I don't see why they'd go out of their way to help Motorola sell more chips.

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care if you are tired. Do you have a clue? Do you have any idea about how drive interfaces work? Somehow I doubt it.

Re:you thought fans were noisy

[Bhagera]

ok, i should qualify that statement a little... but i'm not going to

Dr. Freeze

[Nonesuch]

Dr. Freeze has stopped his mineral oil experiments after mixed results.

The Dr Freeze Page

Re:900 mHZ

[ucblockhead]

Some of us old-timers remember a time when you could hear your PC on the radio.

My old Apple ][+ jammed my favorite station.

i have seen PIII faster than that!

[Frederic54]

guys at hardwarecentral.com have 1GHz PIII for MONTHS! check some benchmark here. There's also an article on their website about multiplier of the PIII, these guys use a x8 or x8.5 on a 112MHz FSB for example. So using two PIII 1GHZ on a P2BD is faster than a single athlon 800!
--
http://www.beroute.tzo.com

Re:i have seen PIII faster than that!

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how that article lacks any details on the system....can we say bullshit? =)

yeah!

[RoLlEr_CoAsTeR]

Now, *that's* the case I would buy!


Especially if it could cool the drink in a matter of seconds!

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[heh2k]

8megs/sec isn't that fast. and you can't get 10,000 rpm 30meg/sec ata drives. it is true that for most users, the price difference between scsi and ata isn't worth it (unless they really want it).

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[Christopher B. Brown]

There was a review a month or so ago in Computer Shopper for the Kryotech model that is "merely" equipped with a souped-up K6-III.

I agree with you that it seems to be a "cool idea" looking for some sort of clue in order to actually be valuable.

It's doing IDE I/O, which means it's not going to be a "barn-burner" from an I/O perspective; all that it really has is a CPU that will doubtless be outmatched by whatever comes out a year from now, with the serious cost of having to pay for a really serious cooling system.

The market sector I'd see it being "hot" in would be that of computer graphics. That is a sector where the priority is forcibly on CPU power.

I think I'd want to use a high end graphics card ($300+) and 256MB of RAM to let the machine really shine.

I didn't see the previous model (K6-III) as being terribly viable; the Athlon feels "less overpriced," but still somewhat pricey for relatively little value.

The merit may come next year when faster Athlon CPUs can get their speed doubled, thereby providing some more massive performance enhancements. Speeding up one CPU may be of little value, but doubling the speed of an SMP box to provide a couple "Gigahertz" worth of power may well be worth $1K for the cooling system...

Re:Uh... Kinda old, isn't this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep.. article created august 13th. Good work, boys.

.. what a waste

[NovaX]

For most people, this is worthless. For those running Alphas, your running them for the CPU (generally). For an x86 chip, most tasks where you'd care about a lot more CPU is for servers or high-end workstations, where the software is why you have the machine.

So, you want more performance for your x86? For what? Upgrading the other components will free the CPU. If you go scsi, and even cheap, low end
scsi drives, your CPU gets a boost (UDMA has reduced it, but it still is noticable). SCSI you can carry over to your next upgrade. CPU being eaten by graphics? Hate to tell you, but why spend a few hundred on a cooling unit (where 50mhz on x86 ~ 5% performance gain), instead of a new graphics card?

You can lust after it... but its a waste of money for most people. Now if it kept the system cool too, that would make it a bit more desirable. I can't tell you how painful trying to fix heat problems (from SCSI mostly) can be.. but then again, buying smartly kept my system humming along at acceptable speeds. (and designing your own home-brewed $60 system cooler is fun!)

Re:.. what a waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Worthless ... until the next version of MS Word comes out, and you find that your computer can't keep up with your typing anymore. This happens, what, about every 2.5 years? It'll happen again: Office 2000 is just around the corner. The Wintel platform is where CPU speed is needed the most.

Also, the PHB won't authorize a DMA disk system, but tell 'im you need more megahurts, and he'll sign the PO.

Two-way Pentium III running at 1 GHz

[trenton]

Sure, they aren't exactly shipping this in quantity, but they did get a dual P3 system to do over 1 GHz. And they did it completely themselves, with off the shelf parts. The authors claim a "unbelievable and completely stable 993 MHz".

Results


Full text

Re:The whole thing... what the bid deal ? ?

[Anonymous Coward]

But I want to play donkey kong at 200X speed. I don't mind burning down M$ though, although who will provide me with the future DOS upgrades if they are gone?

Re:CISC faster than RISC at the same clock speed??

[Anonymous Coward]

IA-64 vs. G4 and in a few months later G5. IA-64 starting at roughly 800MHz, sources have said. Now what will G4's or G5's be by that time?? If they double in two years... oh 1+ GHz. Geez oh well.

Real nice. First you agree that 250 MHz MIPS chips prove clock speed doesn't matter, then you "demonstrate" that G4's will beat Merced by comparing their clock speeds. And where do you get 800 MHz IA-64 in two years!? Merced comes out in less than one year at 800 MHz. It will be considerably faster by the time G4 speeds have doubled.

Uh... Kinda old, isn't this?

[TheKodiak]

This is over a month old - although if they are now shipping it, then that's news...

Not that I wouldn't jump on this in an instant if I had the money. I've always wanted a 50lb refrigeration unit.

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really getting annoying. Whether you know it or not, what you are saying is that standard IDE controllers use programmed I/O. While at one point in time, your argument was true, it no longer is. You can still get some really el cheapo IDE *and* SCSI controllers that use programmed I/O - but they are rare except for the SCSI-1 cards used to run scanners and other peripherals.

Any modern PC IDE controller since the Intel 430HX (I think) chipset "has a brain" in your terms. The CPU requests a read or write and goes back to work. The controller asynchronously issues the read/write, manages the PCI bus, moves the data into or out of memory, and informs the CPU via hardware interrupt when it finishes. Most modern SCSI and IDE controllers supporting bus mastering and DMA produce essentially the same low CPU utilization.

The real reasons why SCSI is the only choice for servers are 1) short IDE cable length limitations and 2) IDE is limited to 2 devices per bus. Recently, ATA/66 added SCSI-like scatter/gather and disconnect features important in RAID configurations. But IDE RAID still doesn't make much sense when you are limited to using 2 drives per bus and they have to remain in the case.

1 GHz?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought I remember reading a couple months ago about them running a K7 at 1 GHz??

Re:1 GHz?

[Zurk]

they demonstrated a 1.2Ghz cooled chip at the shareholders conference. i dont see how this story is really that new.

Re:1 GHz?

[Firefalcon]

They plan to release proper 800 MHz and 1 GHz chips in or around 2000.

Re:1 GHz?

[gorilla]

I'd say there is a big difference between a demo, and a shipping unit.

How many technologies have been demo'd, and never shipped?

Re:Jeez

[Anonymous Coward]

They better support the G4. If not, who is going to buy them? At the price the boards and processors are likely to be available at, people will be expecting G4 levels of performance.

Fast gets slower every few months

[Jimhotep]

What I used to think was fast is too slow now.

Wait till they can chill a 1 gig Athlon.


Say, remember that guy that used mineral oil
to cool his motherboard? Any news from him
lately? I think I lost the link to his page.

Re:Fast gets slower every few months

[Aurik]

The "Super-G", or 1GHz Athlon should be available from KryoTech this December, according to their website.

Unreal? only a little bit...

[delmoi]

Actualy I don't really play games that much, as evidenced by my pentium 200. Unreal levels didn't take that long to load for me, and that was with a 4meg/second IDE hard drive
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

Cover of computer shopper..

[BigZaphod]

I seen this mentioned on the cover of a Computer Shopper mag about a month ago.. But I agree.. I want one. :-)

Why are you wasting time on the fake thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you wasting time on the fake thing? You should be out there in the real world, hunting down Bill Gates and his whole gang of cronies. Free yourself of that enslaved mindset in which those Scam artists has implanted in your brain. Break that chain that is holding you down in front of the "Latest Release" Aisle of CompUSA. Go out there and fight the holy war and free the whole world from the 'Heroin of the 90s.' Follow the lead of the 'Shining Path' and fight for your freedom. Do not let tyrants eat you and your family alive.

Once we destroy all capatalist greed-mongers, we could form our own anarchy and find our next target to anihilate. Probably those guys who refused to give us refunds when we lost our coin in those "missle command" games.


We would never need Quake because we have enough Windoze/Intel worshippers in the world to play quake on for the rest of our lives.


It's 10PM, have you liberated any code today?

Kryotech's cooling system

[the_tsi]

It's old news. :) They've been shipping supercooled boxen for over a year. The 800mhz athlon they've been hyping for a few months now; it's about time Tom got one and reviewed it. Speaking of Tom, anyone else think the quality of his site has gone down very quickly in about the past 18 months? I haven't seen a big motherboard roundup or anything useful for a while. I don't give a flip about the seven-chapter analysis of 32 video cards that's taken three months to come together; we need more variety. I've tried to find a replacement tech website to fill my needs, and the closest thing I can find is Ars Technica, but occasionally they have reviews by people who either don't understand the technology or are just plain cheap (not "economical") about using it. Don't say AnandTech... there's just too much attitude spewing out of that site. :) -Chris (Footnote: KryoTech's PCs may very well be the only worthwhile product to *ever* come out of South Carolina... :P )

Re:Kryotech's cooling system

[coda6]

Tom's in the past has been a very good site for tech, and yes it has been lagging lately, but was has been put out new in the past 18 months? You can't say the "P!!!" it's just a PII ona smaller die and a beefed up bus, Athlon was very well covered and explained but that's about it. Intel hasn't released a new mother board standard (of any use) in a LONG time, all the boards are BX now anyway. I also don't view the Intel 810 with all the intergrated sh** very useful at all.

Re:Kryotech's cooling system

[Anonymous Coward]

Lately (last year and a half), Tom has just fallen off the bandwagon. He was once a great source of motherboard info, overclocking data, memory specs, roadmaps et all.

Now he's just a guy who's in bed with nVidea (yea, 'preferred' site because he shows a bias) and who will take any opportunity to slam Intel.

Tho he's always been religiously anti-Intel, he thought the K5, then the K6, then the K6-2 would 'bury' the latest and greatest from Intel, at least now with the K7 he's right. He never even praised Intel for releasing the Celeron 300A, probably the coolest (or should I say warmest) most reliable overclocker seen to date.

But lately, ugh. And as far as video cards go, this man is a fool. He claimed he could get 'accurate' framerates from the early Q3Test when Carmack said "This doesn't work, don't use it."
So that's why I stopped listening to Tom.

Re:Kryotech's cooling system

[Knara]

It's about 2 months old, this review. So really, it's not "about time" =)

Re:Kryotech's cooling system

[Anonymous Coward]

try http://www3.sharkyextreme.com they have new content daily.

Re:Kryotech's cooling system

[florin]

Tom has had this thing for quite some time, the article had been on there for a while already. A tip for those submitting stories.. check the date on the story. That one was posted August 13.

To the previous poster.. say what you want about Tom's Hardware, but it's still on my run-by-to-check-daily list of websites. I actually think it has gotten somewhat better again in the last few weeks. There were a couple of months that there was nothing worth reading on there anymore and that Tom had really lost touch with his core audience (Like with the test of 32 video cards, where he used the driver that was included in the box, i.e. the entire test a complete and utter waste of time. Or like his reviews of Singapore hotels or German cars.). But the addition of the webnews column as well as a publication of a couple of good old fashioned articles about genuinely HOT stuff like K7 motherboards or Ultra video card comparisons has given me hope that things will get back into shape. They can get rid of Second Hand Smoke though, as far as I'm concerned.

There are now so many hardware tech websites that one really can't follow all of them anymore, but the previous poster has indentified the 3 biggies. I agree that Ars Technica's reviewers don't always appear competent, but I don't agree on the 'cheap' issue; I think most people who visit these websites regularly do it exactly to look for things like overclocking and dual celeron. I also read Anandtech a lot and must say I haven't noticed attitude spewing to an annoying degree, but I do think they have far too many reviews of ordinary hardware (What, another BX board? Another TNT2 clone??) and not enough of what really interests me. For instance, 3 weeks ago Anand complained about having experienced K7 motherboard instability and I'm still waiting for the details. That is hot, that is relevant now, that is what I want to hear about.

One other site (Hardware/Games oriented) that I like a lot is the Tresh's FiringSquad.

yeh, your right

[delmoi]

Its FM interferance, probably due to my amazingly crapy Sound card, Its not so bad in general, infact I can only hear it if I turn the volume all the way up.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

Old Hat...

[Anonymous Coward]

Was this not announced months ago? There is another review I read last week at Firing Squad...

Re:Old Hat...

[sandman71]

About 4 months, they overclocked an AMD chip to a gigahertz using that case. I don't see the big dfeal of overclocking an Athlon to 800mhz. This is old news

Re:Old Hat...

[sandman71]

Sorry, that should read an AMD K6-3 450 chip...

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[CC]

Guilty of living in the past ... s'true I've used nothing but SCSI for years ....

I had to get off my fat ass and go look

You have a point here. It is true the new ATA/66 controllers come close to a SCSI controller in CPU usage and efficient bus usage.

As the IDE interface grows up SCSI moves on though. At the moment 80 meg/sec is standard and U3W is now offering 160 meg/sec, quite a bit faster than a PCI bus. This of course will only be useful on that bus (drive to drive, drive to device).
CC

Re:Noiselevel

[R.F]

They make a lot of noise. You cant sit in the same room and koncentrate. We tested a 800 MHz and it had some bugs in NT, but in Linux it had no problems. ( Bad motherboard I think )

noodles

[Anonymous Coward]

First 'can I make a Beowulf cluster out of them?' post!

900 mHZ

[Accipiter]

With the speeds of processors getting faster and faster, we're going to reach a problem with they hit 900 mHZ. Your processor will interfere with your Cordless phone. (Read: This is no joke!)

Since most new cordless phones transmit at 900 mHZ, having a processor generating the same frequency would cause problems. When the waves from the phone and processor collide, it could cause each signal to cancel the other out, nullifying them both. So how is this problem solved? 900+ processors will actually be built with shielding. Sounds crazy, but it's true.

A bit offtopic, but just a tidbit of info for everyone.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Re:900 mHZ

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy are we gonna be in trouble when processor speeds coincide with the frequency of microwave ovens! We'll have to adjust cooking times up or down depending on the orientation of the two units altering the relative phase! Don't even get me started about how beat frequencies from the two are gonna show up on seti@home after a while!

Re:900 mHZ

[Anonymous Coward]

90% of monitors out there are barely sheilded (about 10% of the electronics are sheilded in them, to protect from receiving interference). Open up your monitor and see... I've only opened one brand of monitor that was properly ("fully") sheilded, except for the front of the tube (I want to use it, man!). Viewsonic monitors...

Re:900 mHZ

[technos]

We still use for our VERY critical inhouse legal databases. It has yet to let us down, really, but it is a total bear to deal with if you started in any newer *nix.

Most people find it funny that I still have a Xenix box, (quad full height 320M HD) on my desk.

Re:900 mHZ

[IanCarlson]

I somewhat agree, but internal shielding is kind of a moot point, as the Van Eck would still pick it up. All internal shielding is good for is blocking out *major* interference present on radios and televisions. Viewsonic monitors are bad as hell, though. I'm got a G810. 21" of pure sweetness.

Re:900 mHZ

[cmos]

I don't suppose that's a very big and new thing.
First of all, the present processors (say 450Mhz) already produce interfering signals in the cordless freq. range. Please remember that when we say 450 Mhz clock speed , we are talking about a square wave (not a sine).. aand square waves include really strong magnitude harmonics (infinitely many of them actually but at least the 2nd and 3rd harmonics are of a square wave are considerable strong). BTW, The 2nd and 3rd harmonics of a 450 mhz clock signal are 900Mhz and 1350Mhz.

hmm, coming to the point:

SO, the present processors also have interfering signals but there is no considerable interference be oserved. Why is this??

The outstanding reason is that the motherboard actually does not generate the high clock frequency. The highest frequency signal present on the board is 100Mhz or 133Mhz (correct me if I am wrong.. but even so, that should not be any more than 200 Mhz!)
The 450Mhz signal is generated in the CPU chip itself, by doubling and trippling and quadrpling the motherboard-provided lower freq. clock. (which should be smt. like 33 or 66 Mhz )

So the interfering signals (ie. the harmonics of 450Mhz, or whatever, are generated and stay within the chip). Yes, the power of this clock signal is big, as it serves the whole chip!.

But I suppose the phyisical structure is not very much like one that would transmit this signal in a way to produce considerable interference! Or else we would already be having problems with cordless phones near the desktop..

Bottom line: with the CPU clock rates increasing to the 900 Mhz range, we will not see a terribly big increase in interference with cordless phones or other equipment operating in the those frequencies.. Because the very high rate clock signal will never ever be present on the mother board actually, instead the mother boards will keep providing 33-66 Mhz signals to the CPUs from which they can generate their own clock signals

Re:900 mHZ

[vitaflo]

With the speeds of processors getting faster and faster, we're going to reach a problem with they hit 900 mHZ. Your processor will interfere with your Cordless phone.

Hmm...so how come when I was in college, and everyone on the floor had 900Mhz phones, I couldn't tap into their conversation? Where was my interference? And why didn't my 25Mhz Mac screw up my 25Mhz cordless way back in the day? Hmm...Ponderous.

Re:900 mHZ

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm...so how come when I was in college, and everyone on the floor had 900Mhz phones, I couldn't tap into their conversation? Where was my interference? And why didn't my 25Mhz Mac screw up my 25Mhz cordless way back in the day? Hmm...Ponderous.

(a). 900 Mhz phones are digital. This makes it impossible for someone to listen in on them with a $300 Rat Shack scanner. Even if you get the digital transmission and try to play it back, it won't work. 900 Mhz cordless phones use super-light encryption. Once broken, yeah, then you can hear it. And I just have $1000 itching a hole in my pocket for it... (not). And even if you had a 900 Mhz phone, there are at least 25 channels. And even if all 25 channels were used, and your phone decided to stomp on someone's signal, then it would sound like this:

FSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSH.

either that, or a modem like sound. I don't know, and I really couldn't care less...

(b). Your mac was sheilded, since it was FCC approved. RF doesn't leak from sheilded boxes.

(c). If your mac wasn't sheilded (ie... Usually very old, seems old machines got away with FCC ratings, even when their sheilding sucked.) then your phone didn't work at 25 Mhz. There is a very high chance it didn't work at 25 Mhz. I don't have my frequency book handy, but I beleive 25 Mhz is used for RC Planes, boats, etc... I know the 47-49 Mhz or so band is used for old Portable phones, Walkie-Talkies, etc... Public, (d). Take a C64. Turn it on. Turn on a radio to about FM 104.5 Mhz, and set it on top of the disk drive. Access the disk drive (LOAD "*",8,1 [return]). Then come back to me with your revised theory.

(e). For the final insult, take your computer to a local Ham radio operator's place. Take the cover off, turn it on, and leave... This will make them want blood... ;-)

Note: I'm not suggesting RF leakage from computers is horrendous, just that it exists. It is infact, not as big a deal as (non radio operator) people might at first think... I keep my case off, and our TV antenna works just fine, TYVM. :-)

Re:900 mHZ

[substrate]

This is why computers are in cases and are tested to be compliant with FCC regulations (as long as they're still in the case, the case hasn't been modified etc). We've passed through similar bandwidth sharing episodes before, such as when CPU's first hit the 100 MHz domain. Thats FM radio.

Re:900 mHZ

[technos]

Odd.. I don't seem to remember any problems with my OC'd 386 and my 48 mhz cordless phone.. ;-)

Re:900 mHZ

[emerson]

If this were going to be a big problem, there'd have been thousands of people complaining that their Pentium-90 and -100's were showing up on their FM dial, four and five years ago. Or people would still hear a harmonic from their 33MHz PCI busses at 99MHz, or a weaker one from their 66MHz PCI or memory busses.

The FCC keeps pretty good clamps on the kind of noise a computer can put out -- read the find print about 'Class B computing devices' -- essentially it can't cause any interference, and must accept any interference it gets.


--

Re:900 mHZ

[cabbey]

(a). 900 Mhz phones are digital.

Not all of them. The one sitting here next to me is 900Mhz, and very much analog. Thus I can - and yes I've tried it, it worked - listen to it on a cheapo RadShack scanner.

yep, 25Mhz is used for RC planes etc, can have some real fun with old 25 Mhz machines though ... great error injector for systems' test labrats. I'd like to find something convienent in the 33/66Mhz range to screw with PCI... ;>

Access the disk drive (LOAD "*",8,1 [return]).

Eh gads! the memories that brings back. . . .

Re:900 mHZ

[Mononoke]

The phone uses an amplified signal powered through an antenna

When transmitting, yes. However, it still has to receive the a fairly clean signal back from the tower. Difficult to do with large quantities of RF noise close to the phone. The noise (even if it's not directly on the cell phone frequency) greats desensitizes the reciever section of the phone.

Sheesh, now every will know I'm a Ham Radio geek too.
--

Re:900 mHZ

[inl101]

900 MHz phones are spread spectrum. No need to worry about your CPU interfering with it, spread spectrum minimizes the effects of narrow-band interference.

Re:900 mHZ

[ChrisDolan]

I disagree that your CPU would interfere significantly with your cordless phone. The phone uses an amplified signal powered through an antenna while the CPU is not amplified and (hopefully) has no antenna other than its own wiring. I can foresee that the phone might negatively influence the CPU (although it should be designed to resist interference regardless of its specific frequency), but the CPU interfering with the phone seems much less likely.

There was a recent Slashdot article about deliberately generating a transmission with your system, but apparently it isn't simple!

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[Lord Kano]

>>SCSI is overrated, I get 8 MB/s sustained with my wimpy little 6 GB UDMA 33 drive.

This is like saying the sex is overrated. After all a bottle of lotion and a nudie mag will cost less than one Christmas or Birthday with a girlfriend. Right?

SCSI is much better than IDE or EIDE or UDMA33. A nice defragged 7200 RPM SCSI2 drive will pound the snot out of a UDMA 33. Wide SCSI2 under similar circumstances will pound a UDMA 66 into the ground.

At home and at work I have multiple computers some with SCSI, some with IDE there is no comparison between the two. Watch a computer with a PII-300 and an IDE hard drive boot slower than a P-233 with an UWSCSI2 and you'll see what I mean. I run Red Hat 6 on both systems and the P-233 with 32mb boots faster than a PII-300 with 64.

Apps launch faster with SCSI. Disk I/O is so much better with SCSI that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that it's faster. If you can afford it SCSI is the way to go.

LK

Kryotech systems

[Vengeance]

Not only has Kryotech been making -40 degree systems available for some time, they now sell empty cases with refrigeration units. You can buy one for 350-400 bucks US.

Kryotech Renegade

Overclocking the Athlon....

[delmoi]

Yeh, I agree toms really lost my intrest, I used to check for updates every few days... now...

but check out his Athlon overclockign info, defently the 'old' tom, riping surface mount transistors of a $800 PCB... oh yeh :)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

Re:900 mHZ - You're Confused

[FunOne]

That should be moderated under 'funny'

Megahertz is a time scale: 1 Mhz = 1 million times per second.

Now, when you talk about phones, you're refering to the radio waves, they oscillate at 900Mhz, and when you talk about processors, you're referring to clock cylces. They have absolutly nothing to do with each other.

FunOne

Through the radio

[delmoi]

Actualy I can hear my computers *software* doing stuff as interferance on my soundcard. Doing things like moving windows around produces a recgonisable pattern. It's quite strange.
For a while I had a program called CPUcool that would turn the CPU off via a hlt instruction when it was idling. This actualy produced a very strong noise, It kept the CPU cool though
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

Re:Through the radio

[Raven667]

I have the same thing. On my system I have attributed it to the mouse, HDD and CDROM motors and the Mic/Line inputs (even if a Mic is not installed). My PCI soundcard is generally better but it is closer to the CPU/Power supply/HDD/etc.

Re:Through the radio

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got this too, and I think it might have something to do with my CD-ROM -> soundcard cable. I get the noises whether I have a CD in it or not, but if I mute the CD-ROM the noise stops.

Re:Through the radio

[davidmacq]

Hehe, This is actually your video card saturating your bus. The video card manufacturers set them up to get the best possible performance, but the sound cards trickle their data across the bus, and when your video card sends data across it affects the sound. Some manufacturers have an option to disable this. Sorry I can't explain it in more detail. I found this out by reading FAQs for winamp, but the Winamp page is less detailed and I can't get the links from Winamp because I'm behind a firewall. If your interested in fixing this check the third party Winamp homepages.

Re:Through the radio

[mistered]

No, not necessarily. I think the poster is talking about analog noise being picked up by the (usually) crappy soundcard output stage, or even worse, by the microphone input. I have a Xitel storm platinum (Aureal, get your act together with Vortex2 Linux drivers!) which has a pretty decent analog section, but if I crank my amp I can hear noise when I scroll in Netscape or do other things.

Granted, video cards *can* saturate the PCI bus and starve your soundcard of the bandwidth it needs, but this kind of interference will come through even if no sound is playing.

What in the world do you use you mhz for?

[Hobbex]

Em, that might be true if you are using it as a server or are in need of some sort of ultra fast performance workstation, but for the only application where those extra 200 mhz are actually needed, what harddrive you have makes shit all difference.

can you say Quake?

I wish I was only kidding here...

-
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.

Re:Not that great

[Anonymous Coward]

If you listen to Moore, shouldn't that be in about 11 years?

Re:900 mHZ - You're Confused

[Mr. Frilly]

Uh, I think you're the one who's confused.

So, you have a chip running at 900 MHz, that means the clock is putting out a pulse waveform which looks something like a 900 MHz square wave, with a good number of the transistors changing state with the clock edge. Now, let's do a quick fourier series of our friendly 900 MHz square wave, and what's the base frequency, you know, the frequency with the most energy, looks like 900 MHz to me.

Granted, you're not coupling the clock chip to an antenna, so you're not going to have the most efficient transfer of our friendly 900 MHz electrical signal to an EM (Radio) Wave, but it's still going to happen, and could well mess up other electronics running at 900 MHz if it wasn't for the nice metal case acting as a faraday cage.

Remember, at some level, every digital abstraction layer has an analog underpinning.

Yes and No (explanations)

[Anonymous Coward]

Your analysis is half wrong and half right.

G4's use a core-based design approach. In the most basic terms, it's "kinda like a multiprocessor system." I was told by my friend that the normal processor basically does one thing at a time ..... The g4 does this differently. Every part of the rpocessor (of course including the floating point unit and AltiVec) can do more than one thing at a time. It has two interger units....

All modern processors are like this. For example, the Athlon contains a total of nine execution units & pipelines: three for address calculations, three for integer calculations, and three for executing floating point, 3DNow! and MMX instructions. The PIII has two pipelined address units and two execution pipelines feeding six execution units (2 integer, 2 MMX, 1 SSE add/accum, and 1 FP + SSE mul/div). The G4 has two integer units, a single FP unit, an address/load/store unit, and the AltiVec unit. Aside from AltiVec the G4(MPC7400) is relatively non-sophisticated compared to the competition. The Alpha 21264 has two integer units, two integer/address units, and two FP units. As you can see, the PPC and Alpha RISC designs (excluding AltiVec again) are architecturally simpler and use fewer execution units and transistors than the x86 designs, yet they are much more efficient.

Now I know I went on this tirade abouut pentiums, but frankly, can Athlons be much different? The pentiums are/were a pretty normal CISC architecture.

The Pentium and K5 were "normal" CISC architectures. The PPro, K6, and later x86 processors are not. They break down CISC instructions into RISC-like micro ops. It's basically like having a RISC CPU at the core with a hardware CISC-RISC translator around it. The biggest difference between RISC CPUs and CISC CPUs is that CISC CPUs are inefficient transistor-wise. The variable length CISC instructions and the variety of addressing modes makes the tasks of decoding and translating instructions, scheduling micro ops, and branch prediction very complex. Therefore, a fast CISC processor requires a ton of extra logic and a lot more careful design than a fast RISC processor.

Other architectures blur the line between RISC and CISC as well. The Alpha architecture is a very pure RISC design, but the Sparc and PPC designs fall in between: they have fixed length instructions but multiple addressing modes (and multiple registers sets in the Sparc).

Pentiums and compliant processors do instructions of multiple sizes. Pretty much any size, really, and then they are broken down to smaller sizes... The theoretical max is 600Million for the PIII comes from this.

Nope. The theoretical max MIPS/MFLOPS of any modern processor is simply equal to the clock speed multiplied by the number of simultaneously executing instructions that can be completed in one clock cycle. It has nothing to do with instruction size. Since the PIII has two integer units and one FP unit, it's theoretical MIPS is 2xMHz and MFLOPS is 1xMHz. For the Athlon, theoretical MIPS will be 3xMHz and MFLOPS is 2xMHz. These figures do not take into account SSE or 3DNow!

But it cant even hold that, that's the theoretical max (who knows the minimum ops?) while the g4 theoretical max is 4 billion, and minimum 1 billion. ..... So a 800MHz athlon probably pushes out a very maximum of 900million ops, being extremely generous, most likely 800million. Max.

Comparing MIPS & MFLOPS is even more meaningless (and misleading) than comparing MHz. The PIII, Athlon, and G4 all have SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) floating point instruction units, SSE, 3DNow!, and AltiVec respectively. Although AltiVec is clearly the most powerful of the three, all perform instructions on multiple sets of data at the same time. Theoretically, in certain cases, the AltiVec unit can perform 8 single precision FP operations per clock cycle on 4 32-bit FP numbers with one instruction. Apple counts 8xMHz as their max MFLOPS. But your MFLOPS number for Intel doesn't count SSE. Therefore, you are comparing apples (pun intended) and oranges. If you did count SSE and 3DNow! instructions, the numbers for the PIII and Athlon would be higher, but not as high.

The SPEC benchmarks, which do not take into account AltiVec or 3DNow!, show that the Athlon has significantly better integer performance and a little worse FP performance than the G4 at the same clock speed. However, if you compare the top of both lines (500MHz G4 and 700MHz Athlon), the Athlon has *much* better integer performance and a little better FP performance. Although there are no direct comparisons available, AltiVec should be much faster than 3DNow! at similar tasks. Therefore, the G4 ought to excel at signal processing and image manipulation. It is also probably faster at 3D graphics & 3D games. The Athlon will excel at most general business and high end applications.

Default Threshold Reached

[LordCrank]

Well, with this comment the default threshold is reached, and there's a couple of things that I'd like to mention.
First, if you were to look at my computer you'd notice the clock is slow. If my computer were operating at 800 megahertz, I'm assuming it'd be fast, or possibly just not as slow.
Second, no matter how much you argue about which computer is fastest, none will ever compare with Batman's supercomputer. Damn that thing is cool. If only I could play Quake 2 on it, I'd die happy.

Where's the any key?

Intel Pentium III to 993 MHz

[dev]

Hi, I recently saw this article about a guy who overclocked his Pentium III to 993 MHz. Interesting reading, -150 degree Celsius cooling involved. Article is in German, babelfish it.

heat resistant Ziplocs? :)

[GW Hayduke]

hmmm.... Anyone know where I can pick up some Heat resistant ZipLoc Bags (VERY LARGE) or Saran Wrap?????? :)
yeah yeah -1 me allready

It's Slashdot's

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been out for over a month, but they just got wind of it.

thresh!!

[pNutz]

stop by thresh's firing squad.
granted, they're mostly game reviews but hardware reviews are very thorough and informed. I seem to recall them reviewing this about a month ago.

They did a little linux intro for gamers a couple weeks ago. good shit. nice and anti-microsloth.

www.firingsquad.com

It's slashdot

[delmoi]

I saw this on toms like 2 months ago, or somthing...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

Re:That Refrigeration unit is wasted

[treilly]

Seriously, that's a great idea, but not to be a jerk, other than maybe those big-mother Foster's cans or a slurpee, where can you get a 32 oz can of anything?

That said, if it could cool off a Foster's can like that, work would be a lot more fun.

For video games, duh...

[delmoi]

Games don't really rely on the IO at all, just the CPU and video card. so for hard core gamers, this really makes sense. It wouldn't do you much good on a server. I'm still using a p200mmx, and it works fine for what I do, but hard core gamers are going to want this
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

hmmm can't I do this allready?

[GW Hayduke]

I have a Igloo Cooler with a AC/DC powerconverter sitting under my desk for jolt, coffee beans, brownies, etc....
Couldn't I just drill a couple holes in my box for cables and dump the case in there????? (Just Kidding Folks)
I'd actually be more interested in cooling off my beer in the PC case :)
yeah yeah -1 me allready

Re:you thought fans were noisy

[m3000]

I haven't heard one myself, but my dad was looking at one in some computer shop, and he said it was pretty quiet. He said it was quieter than our current one, which isn't too loud. It was one of the major concerns for my dad because we are hopefully getting one of those in the Spring, so we wanted to make sure it wouldn't keep my parents up when I'm using it at 3 in the morning :-)

Re:Clock rate... what the biG deal ? ?

[m3000]

That's just what Tom tested it at. If you buy the system, you can put whatever you want on it. The thing only comes with a mobo, chip, cooling system, and case. You add the other stuff. Whenever we get one, we'll take our current SCSI Ultra 2 Wide out, and put in in the Kryotech one, put in 512 MB of RAM, and a GeForce card, and then I'll have one kick ass machine. :-)

Re:900 mHZ - You're Confused

[Negadecimal]

For each clock cycle, you'll have one increase and one decrease in the voltage of clock signals. Basic law of physics: a change in voltage (electric field flux) will correspond to a change in induced electromagnetic radiation. The signal is very weak, but it's still at 900mHz.

Re:Only Windows 98 and NT. What a crime.

[m3000]

They do that because most games and gamers use Windows, and so that pertains the most to them. These sites are for the high speed power users, and most people like power for one thing, games. They are just serving their market.

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[Lord Kano]

>>Traditionally, the drive manufacturers sell their hottest drives only with a SCSI interface.

Because only SCSI can handle the throughput. It's possible to get 120 Mb/Sec sustained with SCSI. That ain't bloody likely with any forseeable form of IDE.

>>Currently, the 10k rpm drives aren't available with IDE interfaces simple because the manufacturers want to maintain a two-tiered pricing structure.

10,000 rpm rives are so fast that it would be a waste of money to make them in IDE.

They could continue to do so if they priced them at the same level as the SCSI drives. If you're right and they performance would be the same, people would pay for it.

>>But the lower speed drives perform equally well in both SCSI and IDE versions.

Older/Slower SCSI devices are on par with IDE. A perfect way to illustrate this is with older Macintoshes. When companies like Sonnet began to release G3 upgrades for Nubus macs one of the Magazines (Mac World/Addict/Or something I don't remember) did a test with MacBench. The SCSI disks on 4 year old NuBus Macs outperformed the IDE disks of last years PCI G3s.

LK

Worthwhile products in South Carolina.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't BMW have a very large manufacturing plant in Spartanburg, SC, where they build both the Z3 and M roadsters?

Signed,
A North Carolina resident defending his mostly-redneck neighbors.

Re:Only Windows 98 and NT. What a crime.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been overclocking for a while and found that the best tool for burning in a cpu(or memory or hard drive)is lucifer(search filewatcher).My so far I haven't found any good benchmarking programs for linux though.........

Re: Dumbed Up for You

[Curt]

Ahhh an anonymus coward failing to comprehend. So people like you can understand....

Clock Spped is irrelevent when comparing chips of different architectures. (not completely irrelevent, you can compare a g3 to a g3 or a pentium to a pentium, fair enough.)

G4 Clock speed will be up there anyways, so soon they will be defeated in both realms, crappy irrelevent measuring and actual power...

Geez oh well they'll have that beat too.

Is that easier to understand?

G5's will be arriving exactly two years from now specing out 2GHz with a new pipeline and new bus topology, coming in 64 and 32 bit flavors with a newer .10 process (current G4 is .15) and Silicon on Insulator technology (soon to be used on G4, interesting stuff)

Not comparing doubling or suspected improvements there.

Intel will have improved Merceds by that time. Merced is already a large chip, especially with that emulator-sub-processor type thing in it and starting at .18 and most likely moving on to .15 by this time. So its pretty big, and thus pretty hot. (geez hard enough time putting pIII's into laptops...)

Don't bother defending the IA-64. Support another. (K7, motorola's friendly parter's chip maybe?)

Re:That Refrigeration unit is wasted

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we could stick the Linux Penguin in the 800's cooler and it could figure out how to run Linux.

Definition of a "PC"

[Jordy]

So what exactly is a "PC". Is an Alpha workstation a personal computer? What about Alpha distributors which market their low-end systems as PCs?

Apple used to constantly put out "Macs vs PCs" advertisements, but recently they've changed their tune and they consider Macs PCs.

Apple has been putting out a lot of hype about how their system is the first "PC" to be under export law, but Alphas have been under restricted export law for years.

AMD's Athlon appears to be faster than the G4 from what little benchmarks I've been able to find, but I don't believe the Athlon is under export law, which I find a bit odd.

FOLDOC says a PC is:

A general-purpose single-user microcomputer designed to be operated by one person at a time.

So I guess being a PC depends on the OS, not the CPU. Does that mean a Windows machine setup for multiple logins is no longer a PC?

Who knows.

--

Re:Definition of a "PC"

[penguinicide]

I think it has sonething to do with the fact that the K7 is a 32 bit chip (with a funky core), and the G4 seems to claim a 128 bit core (probably with all sort of instruction converters surrounding it too)

Re:Definition of a "PC"

[ElecCham]

The reason that the G4 is under export control is not because of the core speed of the CPU... it's because of the AltaVec unit inside the package.

The thing that determines whether you're under export control or not is how many operations per second you can do - no, not FLOPS, any operation. The AltaVec is very, very good at doing a particular kind of operation very, very quickly - thus putting the CPU as a whole over the limit.

Re:Refrigerator Unit and Noise?

[m3000]

Like I posted above somewhere, my dad looked at one in a computer shop somewhere, and he said it wasn't that loud at all. He said it was quieter than our computer now, which isn't that loud either. I wouldn't worry about it.

I've worked with Kryotechs before.

[dox]

My summer job was with a school system that had just purchased 24 Kryotech systems runing amd k6-3's at 500mhz. (i even got a kryotech t-shirt out of it)

here's my thoughts about kryotech:
They are great to brag about, but they are rarely clocked significantly faster than whats already on the market, or soon to be on the market. Tom himself said that he could run the Athlon K7 at 750mhz with no additional cooling. I don't see the huge advantage to dishing out 1,000$ or more for a barebones systems that will be matched by the CPU makers within months.

On another note: Kryotech told my employers that they would have 1ghz machines out by the end of the year. I'm actually suprised they're not out already considering that tom had no problems clocking Athlons to 750mhz. And yet they supercool the 800mhz chip to -30C (i'm not sure about the Athlons but our machines were running -45C to -47C)

-dox

Never underestimate the power of a small tactical nuclear weapon.

Re:I've worked with Kryotechs before.

[ansible]

I would also assume that because of the better cooling, the systems would be more stable than standard air-cooled ones that have been overclocked.

Does anyone have some stability measures (as opposed to anecdotal evidence) of cryo-cooled systems vs. air-cooled?

Re:I've worked with Kryotechs before.

[ElecCham]

The difference here, presumably, is that when Kryotech is selling you an 800MHz Athlon, it's still within AMD's specs. That is, it's not considered overclocked... yet.

I assume you could then go ahead and actually overclock it to... well, who knows to where?

Sure you can!

[Greyfox]

All you have to do is make sure that you get absolutely NO condenscation anywhere in the system or the whole thing will melt down in a variety of interesting ways.

Re:900 mHZ - You're Confused

[bugg]

Why was this moderated up to Informative? *sigh*

If you don't know that electricty induces a magnetic field, you shouldn't be pretending to be an expert

Get a clue.. magnets induce electricity in a wire and electricity induces a magnetic propety (left hand rule) in the wire. Sheesh, i learned this stuff in my introduction to electronics course. (Actually, i knew some of this stuff in Junior High..)

Jeez

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who finds this stupid? I mean, supercooling computers like that. When you could just use equally powerful processors that emit less heat.

The G4 emits 8 watts. It doesn't even need a fan. The PPC just works smarter.

An IBM sales rep used to tell me his favorite sales line when persuading universities to change their crays into AIX boxen (with power processors): Ask them what the cooling cost them every year. Ask them if they could put the saved space into better use.

Having to excessively cool down your computer just isn't very cool.

They sound exactly like pop machines!

[dox]

They sound exactly like pop machines! And they are very heavy... if i weren't young i would have probally thrown my back out:)

My 900MHz phone uses spread spectrum

[msk]

Since my 900MHz cordless phone uses spread spectrum, I do not expect to receive interference from "fixed"-frequency 900MHz devices.

Re:TOM!!

[Zurk]

use anonymiser.com or the other mit web proxy with SSL.

Condensation.

[Eric Seppanen]

Condensation, Condensation, Condensation!

You know, like when you take a can of Mountain Dew out of the fridge and set it down, and it gets all sweaty?

I saw some Unisys motherboards where they tried cooling the CPU like that. The boards got corroded in about two months from all the moisture and were completely destroyed.

de ja vous

[Bookem Danno]

yeah i know the spacing is all off in the subject

didn't /. run a story about a month ago about the same company releasing 1GHz Athalons ETA mid-Sept?
i think i remember something about that.
if someone has the link, please post it, i'm not lazy - i'm just working :)

---

Re:900 mHZ - You're Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, i knew some of this stuff in Junior High.

Heck, I learned it in Grade 4, 6 and did a pointless science fair project on it in grade 8! Did a presentation on it too... (of course, we're not talking hard theory here, just the magnet through the solenoid hooked up to a meter thing...). :-)

Re:1000 mHZ (1Ghz)

[db48x]

I was just looking around, (KryoTech's product page) and while I was there, they updated their products page to include a 1Ghz AMD Athlon (K7) machine. It has links to a press release that they gave at a shareholder's meeting, and a Q&A session. Pretty cool stuff. It won't come out until the end of the year, but it will probably beat Intel to market. db48x@yahoo.com

Another note (even though I haven't read the other replies...) 900Mhz cordless phones just have a radio transmitter that is tuned to 900Mhz. Its compleatly analog for all I know. It really has very little to do with creating digital things at the same frequency. (There was an article on the AirPort for Macs, at 2.4 Ghz... same deal. It doesn't actually use a 2400Mhz chip, just a radio transmitter tuned to that freq.)

Re:900 mHZ - You're Confused

[Accipiter]

Faraday cage! Ah, thank you! I forgot the actual name for it, so I used "shielding." :)

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea what you are talking about. Most of the drive manufacurers sell IDENTICAL 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm drives in both UWSCSI and ATA(UDMA)/66 versions. When you compare the two versions of the same drive, you get nearly identical system level performance numbers.

If you are experiencing better performance in single drive SCSI systems, it is solely due to the performance of the drive, not the interface. Traditionally, the drive manufacturers sell their hottest drives only with a SCSI interface. Therefore, the average SCSI drive in use today is faster than the average IDE drive. Currently, the 10k rpm drives aren't available with IDE interfaces simple because the manufacturers want to maintain a two-tiered pricing structure. But the lower speed drives perform equally well in both SCSI and IDE versions.

The whole thing... what the bid deal ? ?

[Anonymous Coward]

We shouldn't even buy any commercial microprocessors from evil tyrant companies like Intel and AMD. They are there for the whole purpose of enslaving us. This will make you enslaved drones salavate until somebody comes up with a 801Mhz CPU, in which everybody will throw their system out and buy the latest, and all for the purpose of filling those fat corporate pigs's bellies, along with buying their money grubbing mistresses more condos, jewerly and mercedes.

Wasn't the purpose of Linux not just to unleash us from the chains of microserf? But also to unleash us from having to constantly upgrade to the latest machine because 1 more reverse-add/rotate instruction was added to the same old lame CPU with a new and exciting name? We were liberated when we could take the 8088, in which the cronies at Intel made us upgrade 60 times since, out of the attic and start using it again. But it looks like those Peecee magazine has brainwashed all the users already. Cementing into our head that We want Megahertz. Don't forget, mhz envy only applies to the 'doze world, where software bloat was a constant requirement to throw out our perfectly good 600mhz PIII because the paper clip in MSOffice was slowing down your typing too much.

We have to honor Linus' tradition of being humble, not having the gimme more mentality, and destroy any company that stands in its way. This includes all hardware companies that tries to milk the 6 billion people of the world out of their blood earned money just so that Andy Grove could sink his 500 ft yatch and buy a 800 ft one.

So all you Intel Developers, follow the ideaology of Comarade Linus and plant bugs into your processors. Also send anon-email of proprietary information so that it could be common knowledge for the whole world to share. Once your enslaver dies, we would embrace you back into the commmunity and forgive you for


It ain't free until they are bankrupt.

Re:The whole thing... what the bid deal ? ?

[Anonymous Coward]

sheesh. fast computers (like my AMD 486DX120) are a joy to use. One of these days I'll get around to getting a fast video card for it, too...

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The ATA/66 spec has done away with this limitation, so the only reasons left to use SCSI are if you have more than 4 total devices or need RAID.

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Argh, that's not true! The CPU utilization has nothing to do with IDE or SCSI, it depends on the method of transferring data from the controller to memory. Programmed I/O uses a large % of CPU time with either SCSI or IDE. Similarly, when the controller supports bus mastering & DMA (and they are enabled) both SCSI and IDE use practically no CPU time. The reason why this myth keeps being perpetuated is because Windows ships with DMA disabled by default in its IDE drivers.

So...?

[Curt]

This kind of thing is never a big deal. Two or three years ago at Macworld SF some company showed off a 550MHz PPC processor (crud, thats as fast as the ffastest g3 availible right now, and at a time of 200-300MHz pentiums and macs... well it was ahead of its time) . Had some fancy-schmancy cooling system too. Company died off in a month or so, oh well.

Other notes of interest:

My Voodoo1 (running at 50MHz) has very little radio shielding. Can't listen to the radio and play quake at the same time...

G4'd still beat the Athlon, I'm fairly sure. I dopn't know everything about them, but unless they have a radically different design aproach from the normal pentium or whatever, they don't touch a g4.

I was explaining this one day to my friend.

G4's use a core-based design approach. In the most basic terms, it's "kinda like a multiprocessor system." I was told by my friend that the normal processor basically does one thing at a time.

And this is pretty much confirmed by some fact sheets on Intel's site explaining how a 600MHz pIII does 600 million floating point ops/sec. (600MillionHertz=600million ops)

The g4 does this differently. Every part of the rpocessor (of course including the floating point unit and AltiVec) can do more than one thing at a time. It has two interger units. That should be self explanitory. It has a 64-bit fpu, than can do 1 64-bit calculation or 2 32-bit and so on... It has 128-bit Altivec which can do 1 128-bit, 2 64-bit, 4 32-bit, 8 16-bit or 16-8 bit. You can then see where Apple got their THEORETICAL max or 4 gigaflops, but it can hold that 1 gigaflop too, which is the big deal.

All PPC instructions are the same size, tradionally. 32-bit. It's part of being a RISC chip, it helps performace some, standardized size(s) of these instructions. A few variants now, but not a big deal, compared to what is normally done on the dark side....

Pentiums and compliant processors do instructions of multiple sizes. Pretty much any size, really, and then they are broken down to smaller sizes... The theoretical max is 600Million for the PIII comes from this. But it cant even hold that, that's the theoretical max (who knows the minimum ops?) while the g4 theoretical max is 4 billion, and minimum 1 billion.

Now I know I went on this tirade abouut pentiums, but frankly, can Athlons be much different? The pentiums are/were a pretty normal CISC architecture. So a 800MHz athlon probably pushes out a very maximum of 900million ops, being extremely generous, most likely 800million. Max.

It can claim to be the fastest PC (personal computer, as opposed to a 1GHz Alpha Monster) by clock cycle alone. Very true. But this does not measure the real potential power of the processor. Theoretical and minimum ops show that.

MegaHertz is an outdated form of speed measurement with things like the core-based design. Basically its like comparing a multiprocessor 500MHz system to a normal 600MHz or 800MHz or whatever single processor system. Are quad PIII 500's or a single 800MHz better? Still can be disputed, depending on what is being run, but one surely has more potential pwoer.

And hey with CodeWarrior already able to do the Altivec stuff, and the libraries out there for months now, they can take advantage of that g4. No problem.

-Curt out.

"Hey there was in eyelash in my nose!?"
"How did you know there was an eyelash in your nose?"

Re:So...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Altivec is no different than MMX, 3DNow, or the new instructions in PIIIs and Athlons. it processes multiple data words (i.e. 'vec') in one instruction. This lets you cite really high FLOPS, but is misleading. Real floating point instructions can be executed in any order and do anything. Vector instructions like Altivec, MMX, etc., cab only do a few very particular things. Now, it turns out that a few things are very well suited to vector instructions (i.e. some image filters, some steps in the 3D rendering pipeline, etc.) But to believe that it will result in an overall speed increase for most applications is ludicrious. Most computer programs simply can't be written in a form that takes advantage of vector instructions.

CISC architectures have generally also outperformed RISC architectures at the same clock speed. This is because CISC has more instructions (the 'C') and thus basically can do "more" in one clock cycle. The original advantage of RISC was simply to get increased clock speed. The exception to this rule is math instructions, which aren't disadvantaged on RISC vs. CISC, but then again, most programs don't make heavy use of pure math.

A Round up of hardware sites(Re:Kryotech's co....)

[Xamot]

These are the sites I've heard of and check.

• Sharky Extreme
• Ars Technica
• AnandTech
• Hard OCP
• Ace's Hardware
• CompHardware
• Tom's Hardware
• The Tech Zone
• Thresh's FiringSquad
• Review News

I have a few more URL's, but they are only cover specific types of hardware like one for 3D boards, BX mobos, AMD chips, etc. Note these aren't really in any order of preference, but I do read Ars and Sharky the most.

--

Speed Limit: c

[Anonymous Coward]

I could be wrong, but it's probably impossible to make a processor that runs at 1 THz. The problem is that in 1 picosecond (the time between pulses at 1 THz), a signal travelling at the speed of light can only travel ~0.3 mm. This means that all transistors using the same sync signal would have to be within 0.3 mm of each other to communicate within the time of a single clock cycle.

Now if we could just get a toilet.

[fulltincan]

Ah with a nice refridgerator at the PC keeping it and your food cold, all we need is a toilet to sit on and we're set for "life".

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[ElecCham]

Two words: bus contention.

I couldn't really care less about how fast the transfer rate of a single hard drive is - that's really not the question to be asking when it comes to IDE or SCSI.
The question to be asking is, "Do I expect to ever be asking for more than one hard drive access at a time?"
Admittedly, I'm definitely a power user - I do a lot of audio and graphics, work, 3-D raytracing, that sort of stuff. But my set of four "puny" little 2 and 4GB SCSI-2 Wide drives, in actual use, will kick the tar out of any single or combination of IDE drives on the market today.

See, the thing is, a single hard drive can't transfer at anything *close to UltraATA/66. Only the fastest two or three drives on the market come anything close even to UltraATA/33. What matters is, with SCSI, all the devices on the chain can share the bus! That means on my system, SCSI ID 0 can be loading WinDoze DLL's, ID 1 can be swapping memory pages, and ID 2 can be doing the Fourier transforms on a 65MB audio file... so what that each drive is only transferring at 8MB/s! On an IDE system, only one device can access the bus at a time, so... everybody else waits. That's one of the big reasons that everybody tells you not to have a CD drive on the same bus as a hard drive; the drive will be sitting around waiting for that darned slow CD.

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[CC]

The reason SCSI is quite a bit more expensive that IDE is that the SCSI controller on the card is a smart hunk of silicon.

The IDE controller on the mobo (nearly always) is a brainless thing and uses CPU cycles to do it's IO.

The SCSI controller has it's brain on board and all the system has to do is hand off it's IO to the SCSI controller which will take care of it with very little CPU usage needed.

DMA enabled or disabled has nothing to do with this. The data gotta' be writ and red.

DMA is really just a way to get around the software memory manager which will always be slow.

Just ask yourself why *every* serious server runs SCSI if what you say is true.
CC

Noiselevel

[qha]

Does anyone own one of these beasts? I'm very interested in heering about the noiselevel of the compressor. I sleep in the same room as my computer (No I don't put it to sleep at night;) so this matters a great deal to me.

HC gamers suck regardless

[Pope]

All these overclocking sites IMHO are aimed at "hard-core" gamers, ie people who spend WAY too much time (and money for that matter) playing games.
They ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE the latest and greatest of "x" so they can impress their other weiner friends and everyone else who listens.
I know the type.
Personally, I couldn't care less whether I can play Quake at 1200x1024 because I overclocked my CPU, whereas before I could *only* play at 800x600.

As for the above poster, have you played Unreal? I hate waiting for the levels to load... :)

PPoE

The G4 excels at

[TheInternet]

AMD's Athlon appears to be faster than the G4 from what little benchmarks I've been able to find

As I understand it, G4's integer performance does not vary greatly from the G3 (at least not more than what you would expect from a 400-500mhz jump). It's the FPU performance that's off the scale, particularly when applications are written to specifically take advantage of the 128-bit vector unit (Velocity Engine/AltiVec).

Things like media encoding, SETI@Home, Photoshop, scientic modeling simulation programs, anything with heavy number crunching really flies on G4s. Of particular interest is the fact that the G4 is quite good at the type of calculations required for cryptography.

Additionally, 7400 (G4) requires little power, and produces very little heat, which means it should have no trouble transitioning to PowerBooks relatively soon. No supercooling required! :)

- Scott

------
Scott Stevenson

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[CC]

The real reason to use SCSI is of course because an IDE controller will use about 30% of your CPU to do it's work.

A SCSI system will use on the order of 2% CPU to do the same thing.

For a server this is importent for sure, but also for yer high end gaming system too.

You blast past a couple of newbies (2 frags) then around the corner where "Killmax" is almost for sure waiting and .... load the room to RAM .... boom.

That's where 2% CPU will save yer ass!

CC

Tom's a cool guy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Rob and Jeff can certainly learn a thing or two from Tom--advertising-wise, that is. Man, those ads are delicious. How many of you clicked to the Salon story on Jennifer Lopez' butt.

Cute! Tom, that's the way to go!

Re:You mean "multiple core"

[TheInternet]

G4's use a core-based design approach

I believe you mean "multiple core design". All CPUs have something that passes as a core.

- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson

The answers are obvious

[khaosworks]

Why would you want to produce a processor that only runs efficiently at -36 degrees centigrade? Sure, the benchmarks are great, if YOU'RE ON MARS.

The answer is obvious. AMD is secretly producing these things for space aliens. And when the humans discover their base on Yuggoth, they will have the computing capacity to crush all resistance in their path.

On the other hand, it could be because some nimrod just decided to take 'cool computing' too literally.

Besides, hey, I'd pay $2,200 for a PC that looks like a steam-powered marital aid.

you guys are slow

[Anonymous Coward]

This is old news....this happened a long time ago...(like a couple months..)

Yes, please! Know any 2/4/8-way Athlon mobos?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're constantly upgrading/expanding our cluster. It is currently composed of dual PII/III's. We'd like to use Athlons in quad configurations to save on harddrive/RAM/case/card costs. They're way cheaper than Xeons or anything else at their speed. If you know of any such mobos, please post!

Cool Alphas?

[mrBrad]

Apparently they are also working on a cooler for 21264's... They have already done a '164.

TOM!!

[Signal 11]

I can't believe it. Ever since he started adding banner ads and going commercial, that site has been on the express route to hell. The latest insult is that I can't even view the reviewed computer because his site toys around with the HTTP_REFERER field that any respectable privacy-enhancing firewall and proxy will filter. It seems most sites when they go commercial lose alot. Slashdot seems to have been the exception so far - it hasn't changed a bit (except that Rob now has more time to break things and make the site inaccessible. *g*)...

HEY TOM! Wake up - there's alot of us out here at work that can't bypass our firewalls easily. You want us to all view your pretty advertisements right? Stop meddling with the http referer then - it's not a mandatory part of the HTTP protocol! Fooooooo....

--

User upgradable

[technos]

As complicated as it looks, these puppies (and their older models) are user upgradable. Granted, you have to order the new chip from Kryo, but thats excusable. All it amounts to is clamping down the compressor (some of them came with autoclamping connectors) and unscrewing the super cooled chip. Go ahead and buy the overclocked 800. When the 800 comes out, Kryo will have it overclocked to 1.1G, and they'll be more than happy to sell it to you sans compressor/case.

1st paranoia post...

[Anonymous Coward]

Im sure that this is what the Gov has been planning all along! Once we hit the 900Mhz mark...they will begin monitoring my computer with cordless phones!

you thought fans were noisy

[Bhagera]

How loud do you suppose one of these things would be when the compressor is running? Running one as a server stuck in a closet might be fine tho.

Re:you thought fans were noisy

[Anonymous Coward]

The last guy wrote, "Running one as a server stuck in a closet might be fine tho." And that is a terrible idea. If you put a refrigeration unit in a closet without ventilation, it will get REALLY hot in there. There's a constant stream of warm air coming out of the heat exchanger. Eventually it will get so hot in the closet, either the refrigerator or some other hardware would fail. But yeah, noise is a big problem. I'm getting sick of the whine of fans, I'd like to put mu CPUs behind a wall, just to keep the noise down.

Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[ndfa]

They use 128Megs of RAM, and an EIDE drive ?

Am i missing something here or has INTEL marketing done such a good job that people who should be thinking of ways to improve performance in other ways are just taking part in the rat race for more clocks ? ?

EIDE, now thats something that i find funny, if you are going to do soooo much to a system, at least have the decency to put in a nice Ultra2Wide drive in there. I dont care what numbers say, SCSI still makes a lot of difference!
Secondly, how about some more memory please ? ?

then comes the question that is it really worth the darn hastle ? things going to be slow in a few months anyway, why waste money on a few clocks if you can spend it wisely on otherthings ?

Dont get me wrong, in practice its cool to see what a processor can push, but we have seen it too many times. Its bad enough that all the marketing hype is about "xxxMhz".... sure, lets put a 600Mhz, Celery, with slow RAM, a crapy vdo card, slow Drive, and call it top of the line!

On most things a system with well chosen components will outperform (in the real world) one that has just a faster processor!!! why we keep getting these "supercool" things is a mystery to me.....

I am not trying to start a war here, i am just saying that maybe articles like this should include a fair warning to users about alternatives to FASTER processors!

just my .02$

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[DoomHaven]

>>Watch a computer with a PII-300 and an IDE hard
>>drive boot slower than a P-233 with an UWSCSI2
>>and you'll see what I mean.

Not bloody likely! Boot time for SCSI is horrible! It has to boot IDE first *regardless*. Then the SCSI's have to get detected. Then SCSI drivers, RAID setup, *then* OS boot up. This takes time...a LOT of time.

I have seen Win98 IDE boot twice as fast as a faster Win95 SCSI (the SCSI was on the motherboard). Sorry for the lack of XMHz numbers.

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[davidmacq]

Unfortunately, UW2 drives are very expensive and so are the disk controllers. Also, one of the main advantages of scsi, imo, is less CPU utilization. Personally, I would rather have a 7200 rpm Ultra DMA/66 hard drive and a whole computer for around $1200 instead of spending $1200 on just a HDD and controller. That stuff is fine for servers and such or whenever the company is paying for it. I do agree that the money could be spent better than on refrigeration.

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[mistered]

Not true. Sure, some older motherboards would boot an IDE drive and then load SCSI drivers and then load the (rest of the) OS from there. Newer BIOSes will let you boot from a SCSI drive directly.

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[CC]

Boy .... set yer BIOS to boot SCSI.

Why would anyone care how long it takes to boot windoze ... yer supposed to suffer.

export FLAME_ON=1

Where did all the winlusers come from anyway ... there is no place to get away from em' anymore ... well there is the scary place of devils, most of this lot would earn a killfile instantly there :o).

export FLAME_ON=0

CC

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[Quikah]

SCSI is overrated, I get 8 MB/s sustained with my wimpy little 6 GB UDMA 33 drive. Newer drives will get you a couple more MB/s. Plenty for me, I even do video capture on this thing with fairly low compression (4:1). The only reason to go SCSI is if you are using a multiuser system, need stupidly fast transfers with RAID 0 or need high data integrity with RAID 5.

For a single drive/single user system IDE (UDMA33 or higher) is the way to go.

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[CC]

I'm tired .... wrong
CC

Re:Clock rate... what the bid deal ? ?

[Mononoke]

Am i missing something here or has INTEL marketing done such a good job that people who should be thinking of ways to improve performance in other ways are just taking part in the rat race for more clocks ? ?

Seems to be a common problem among humans: If it's a bigger number, it must be better.

Of course, I remember when pinball machines only had four-digit scores. Adding a bunch of zeros didn't make the games any more exciting to me. (So, the side bumper is now worth 300,000,000,000,000 points? I'm still not gonna win a g'damn free game.)

--

Kryotech

[R.F]

I testet a Kryotech 800 last week. Will have an articel in english, with Linux compiling, vs a supercool Dual Celeron form ASETEK. www.computerdk.dk

Why buy Intel?

[Anonymous Coward]

When AMD's price drops on Oct 4. hit the market, why would any knowledgeable person pay for a PIII 600 when he can get a Athlon 550 which is faster than the P III and costs much less? My next non-server system is Athlon 550 or 600 bought in 3 months when they are cheaper.

Faster clocks will come at room temp

[peter303]

Its a matter of thinner chip circuitry and lower
voltage. The techs are working on it.

Re:User upgradable (amd correspondance)

[Anonymous Coward]

i was asking someone at amd about this:

Q1) will new motherboard and cpu combinations be available from kryotech,
providing that the refrigeration unit remains the same for the next
speeds?
A1) The SuperG will have a more robust cooling system than the Cool Athlon
800. I do not know AMD's roadmap for the next set of Athlon processors, but
anticipate upgradability from the SuperG as long as the form factor remains
the same. As always, it is hard to tell for sure what direction the
computer industry will go next.

old news

[Anonymous Coward]

This is old even for /., and yes they are shipping and YES THEY DO WORK nicely :) How about some news from this month, or are we still testing cachedot :)

Listening to your PC on your radio

[jms]

Even better. We had (have) some IBM model 120 X-stations. They made funny little noises, depending on what was happening on the screen. This was a very useful feature, because when you were waiting for something to happen, you could look at something else, and the X-station would make a sort of "Zzzzt" noise when it was finished. One day I took the cover off to find out what was happening, and it turns out that the noise was coming from the fan. Apparently, digital noise was getting into the cooling fan circuit, and somehow one was modulating the other and producing human-hearing range noises!

Fast is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Me like playing Quake II. Quake II run better on faster machine. Faster machine goood.

source for Peltiers and stuff...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.peltiercoolers.com

Doesn't look like it's up yet, but hopefully soon. I'm itchin' to make an Athlon go 1000mhz. :)

Thermal Stress on neighboring components

[Speare]

The typical ubergeek rarely worries about the longevity of their computer hardware, and instead worries about whether or not the next model will have more horsepower or gamma rays.

However, I've heard that many of the random failures that creep in as a system gets older is not in fact due to bugs in vspazzod.386 or /etc/funky/.blah, but instead due to the relentless temperature cycling and subsequent warping of the many-layer fiberglass pcboards.

I can imagine that a bath of liquid nitrogen might help a processor operate at frequencies that annoy your neighbor's televisions, but can the fiberglass deal with it?

Not that great

[JM_the_Great]

800mHZ isn't anything new. And, in a year or two, we will look back at this and say "Wow, that's so slow, how did we ever manage". I remember thinking that my 75 Pentium was really cool, now I think of that as slow. Any speed is reachable, it's just a matter of time (1tHZ anybody?).

That's my 1/50 of $1.00 US
JM

Not quite the fastest in the world...

[Wonko42]

I know this is kinda' mean, but...er...this isn't such a big deal. I work for Chipzilla and people here were playing with processors over a year ago that did well over 1GHz without too much extra cooling. More than the usual amount, of course, but nothing supercooled. The systems were slightly unstable, though, and they were purely for testing new manufacturing processes. More than that I can't say, since I wasn't directly involved in the usage of the machines. All I know is, I'd have loved to put a distributed.net client on one of those babies...

LAN Parties

[Moonwick]

I should order one of these and bring it to the next LAN party I attend.

It's sure to make me the hit of the crowd, especially as the refrigeration unit will be sure to cause circuit breakers to trip at random. :)

Only Windows 98 and NT. What a crime.

[heroine]

Too bad Tom's Hardware and all the main overclocking sites use nothing but Windows to demonstrate the hardware. How fast is the floating point in Linux? How many 640x480 JPEG frames can it compress in a second?

Oh yeah, it's true, but

[jht]

...but it's real old news. Kryotech has made kits to supercool Alphas and Pentiums, so the Athlon isn't much of a leap for them. I think the Alpha folks had Kryotech on stage with them at Microprocessor Forum or some similar event this year to do the Alpha at 1 GHz demo.

Tom covered this back in early August, when he was in yet another "I'm better than you, puny humans" phase - he wrote an article announcing that he had figured out how to overclock Athlons, but that he wasn't going to tell anybody becouse it was just too technical for mere mortals. After a suitable interval of being flamed by the universe, he spilled the beans a couple of days later.

Tom's has gotten a little less interesting of late. I think part of that is because the hardware scene has been relatively static lately, - Athlon is the first radically new thing in a while as far as motherboards/processors go in the Wintel space (I'm not counting G4, guys - Tom doesn't cover that!).

- -Josh Turiel

boot times!

[qbwiz]

You think that your boot times are long now.
You have to wait for that to cool down to -36 degrees Celsius before it even boots up(this is a prime canidate for Unix )!

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.

How to overclock an Athlon

[Lxy]

Actually, there is a VERY VERY nice HOWTO on how to overclock your Athlon to 1050 Mhz here . I do find it silly that you can clock it up to 750 with no additional cooling and that extra 50 Mhz requires a portable super-freezer. My guess is using the cooler (which is available seperate on kryotech's site.. The Kryotech Renegade) you could slap an Athlon 1050 in the box and have no stability problems whatsoever.

Shameless gloat :)

[Robert S Gormley]

My *home* machine has 3x18gb UW2 drives and an Iwill controller :) 384mb of ram too :)

SCSI not that fast

[mplex]

Contrary to popular belief, SCSI is not much faster at all than EIDE. Here is an article from, uh, zdnet. Anyway, from what I can see, it is a pretty good article. Also, u2w with only one drive is not going to be any faster than uw. Though the bus can do 80mb/s, most scsi drives do about 13mb/s. About as fast as eide. There are faster scsi drives, but not much faster. It doesn't eat processor cycles like ide though. Prove me wrong, but read the article first...

No, This is not the fastest PC.

[Robert Bowles]

Here are a few examples:

1. A simple Dual-PII-450.
   with any decent multitasking OS (linux, maybe solaris-x86), you'll be faster (and happier (and cheaper than $2200) ) with a dual-cpu machine.
2. My ancient Alpha-PC164-500mhz
   The Athlon, touted for superior floating point, still falls short in Spec_FP. You can find PC164 motherboards (with 500mhz cpu) on eBay for about $250. These machines are arguably PC-architecture, having built-in PCI/ISA/IDE. Yes, these are slower on int perfs.
3. The new Compaq/Alpha WebBrick (DS10)

Refrigerator Unit and Noise?

[ffatTony]

Is the cooling unit very loud? I have a tiny dorm 'fridge that produces the the most annoying sound, I couldn't imagine that in my office even if it did mean better Q3 performance.

Tom's Hardware is usually very current. This article seems a little old. Anyone know if that is the fault of Tomshardware or Slashdot?

In any case. It was a great read. Everyone go out and buy a computer which doubles as a place to keep icecream cold.

You should see it running with some decent video..

[Thomas Charron]

This is an older article. The one that REALLY impressed me was when they tested three popular 3D cards in this pupy.. Take a look at this link

That Refrigeration unit is wasted

[R3]

Processor cooling? Pffftt!
I am pretty sure that the small fridge on the bottom could easily handle more than that. KryoTech should come up with Renegade Deluxe case that has a round slot (preferrably motorized) on front where one could insert a 32oz can of beverage of choice (Dew, Jolt, beer) for cooling. It would also include cross-platform Cool Alerter (TM) software that would monitor the temperature of the drink and notify you when the drink is ready.
Now, *that's* the case I would buy!

Take his reviews with a grain of salt

[_ECC_]

Granted this kryotech thing is real and its been proven for well over a year now on all types of systems, and the athlon is the proven winner in mhz to mhz comparisions with the intels. But don't believe all of what you read on Tom's site!

As of late his site has become full of useless banter and opinionated (subjective) reviews full of insults aimed squarely at specific companies and people.

Anyone familiar with his bout with Brian Hook, formely of iD software, knows what I'm talking about.

Please remember that this is the same guy that was sponsered by nvidia, during which time he gave them a good review.... and 3dfx a bad review... seems like greedy favortism to me.

-Ecc