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Hardware

The Plusses And Perils of Overclocking 248

mblase writes "This C|Net article, published this morning, covers some of the advantages and many of the drawbacks involved for those who want to seriously overclock their PC hardware -- and why."
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The Plusses And Perils of Overclocking

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    Celeron -$100
    Cooling unit -$300
    The look on an OC'ers face when the blue haze of death strikes - Priceless
  • by Anonymous Coward
    I don't mean any disrespect; your viewpoint is that of most IT people. But most IT people don't know how to get the most out of their systems, let alone overclock.

    There's a real reason why OC'ing is done, with servers that need to be up on a 24x7 basis.

    The usual scenario is that Company X lays out a budget for the IT department; and then the Company starts growing faster than expected. Of course, the IT budget isn't increased accordingly, or in a timely fashion. Servers start to get swamped, and then you're in a mad rush to try to buy and bring up some new servers. Assuming, by then, you still have the budget for them.

    What I like to do is to plan my new servers with systems that I know that I can OC later on. It's nice having that extra horsepower around if I need it. And it's a LOT faster than trying to get approval for a new server.

    Yes, yes, I know. If things were planned properly, and you have good management, this wouldn't be an issue. That is, unfortunately, all too rare in the business.

  • I've had more than one cute girl sit in my lap while I did something on the computer.

    Actually, that is why i *underclock*, I mean.. why rush things?
  • Yeah, and with the resources you spent on free software, you could have bought ready-to-use proprietary packages. And with the resources you spent on building your own PC you could have bought a Dell. And with the resources you spent on your significant other, you could have bought...

  • Nope. I don't touch Win9x/ME... especially when I'm using MSVC.
  • It's got some bump in the trunk.
  • Ah! Now it makes sense.

    This is what Sun Microsystems is talking about, when they're saying they're going to put chips into refrigerators and run waffle irons on Java.
    --
  • "crash too frequently"? What are you talking about? Computer hardware these days runs years without crashing. It's fantastically reliable.

    Maybe you need to upgrade your OS.

    Personally, my dual slocket celeron 300A's have been running smoothly at 450 for a couple years now. No crashes. Reboot for kernel upgrades a couple times a year.

  • two words: Omni GLH
  • I see this story about the overclocking/fiddling around with stuff. Then I read the story about the Marine Corps and their maser.

    I now know who is going to win the Darwin Award in a couple of years.

  • That's what I don't get. I always chuckle when I see a Geo Metro driving down the road that has been souped up with those stupid wider wheels, detailing, hydralics, custom interior, etc. For the money they spent to do that, they could have actually bought a car instead of fixing up a go-cart.

    I have to admit that I really laughed at this section of the article: Physical injury is even a possibility. "You're dealing with a lot of heat," Blevins said. "I've had friends get third-degree burns working on their systems." I mean, come on! If you are taking all of these cooling precautions wouldn't it be somewhat logical the the chips might get just a little warm?
  • The people who buy the expensive cooling gear are the nuts - the rest of us are just cheap and like getting something for nothing (or $15 for a better fan/heat sink combo like the Golden Orb and a little silicon grease).
  • Amen - some people get so up tight about overclocking. They don't take the time to read about moderate overclocking (ie pushing a Celeron CPU from a 66Mhz FSB to a 100Mhz FSB - all your components like PCI bus still at regular specifications except your cpu)... Instead they focus on the people who spend hundreds of dollars because they enjoy the hobby and of course the "effects of overclocking" which boil down to a little extra heat in reality. Nobody likes to have an unstable system. You can easily have a stable system if you go with the flow, keep the buses within reasonable specs (I stay at spec), and don't try to push a CPU that can't do it. If a CPU works for a large percentage of people (see the db at overclockers.com) and yours doesn't - tough shit, go buy another...
  • oh, sure. 600 mhz, eh? being that you'd need either the highest quality ram at the time (you said "a few years ago"), which was pc100, you'd be not only overclocking your system bus to 133 mhz (at the celery 300's 4.5x multiplier), you'd also be overclocking your ram to that point. and a few years ago, most motherboards were LUCKY to get near a 121 Mhz bus, let alone 133 Mhz. what did you use to cool this chip that was overclocked 200 percent? what kind of motherboard did you use? personally, I have a dual celeron 366 setup overclocked to 550 Mhz each on an Abit BP6 motherboard, and it's been rock solid (after a bios update or two) on my linux mandrake system for almost a year and a half. if you're going to post something to incite conversation, at least get your facts straight. I'd respect a well-informed liar much more than someone who spouts off with half-true information.
  • actually, yeah. go get yourself a Mini SuperOrb. you should be able to fit that one the BP6. I did. it's small enough in diameter to fit in the restricted area on that wonderful mobo, but made my previously semi-stable dual celeron 366 setup rock solid.

    www.bp6.com has a bunch of info on this board. :)

  • are you stoned?

    usually, the cpu is multiplier locked, so the only way to increase the clock speed is to overclock the system bus, which overclocks the bus speed, ram speed, and usually overclocks anything that's running on the PCI slots.

    PCI slots are usually running at a divider of the bus speed, i.e. if the system bus is 100 Mhz, then the divider is 2/3, which keeps the bus speed at 66 Mhz. however, anything other than 66, 100, or 133 Mhz dividers are not supported, and most mobo's will support 1 Mhz increments, which will overclock everything else.

    many new athlons and durons aren't multiplier locked, so you can do a multiplier increase to knock up the cpu speed, but most mobos (especially the Abit KT7) will still allow 1 Mhz incremental increases in the bus speed for that extra increase.
  • While you will never be able to make your 4-cylider neon even think about touching a stock viper (or any other "real" car), the point is good. The original poster should've said something more along the lines of hopping up a tahoe to get escalade quality - the parts difference to get the upgrade doesn't justify the results. Meanwhile, I'm considering buying a Ford Focus exactly because it's a cheap, upgradeable entry point that can be a lot of fun for a lot less money than other fun cars. That's teh same reason that all of my computers (and cars) are overclocked. It's a cheaper way to enter, and tehn I spend a little time making something that I like and can have fun with. There just isn't the same satisfaction from throwing a pile of money at something.

    For the record, I've also got an '80 caprice and a '75 El Camino that both have 400+ HP 350s, and a full-size truck with a moderate 454, so I don't really qualify as a rice boy (they've all got steel wheels and no more than 2-color paint jobs) yet... :)

  • 400 HP with a mouse is good but any rs or yenco ( giving my age there way ) chevy would leave that behind.

    Yeah, but the camaros wouldn't even start to approach the 25MPG my caprice was getting... :) I didn't build it to be a balls-out racing machine, I built it to be relatively cheap. Besides that, yencos were almost all rats (the chevelles and the camaros). I'll ignore the part about "any RS", 'cause I know darn well that most of them weren't factory rated at 1HP/cid or better... Not that I wouldn't trade my caprice for a first generation camaro (or even better, a '70 LS6 anything) in a heartbeat despite that. ;)

    It's OK though, the cars I've had and sold through the years tend to get faster and faster as time goes by too. :)

  • Uhhh.... No.
    It's not office loading faster, it's framerates so fast you can blast your opponents into oblivion before they even see you coming. There's definitely some adrenaline there.
  • Is it really a good idea to underclock a system? I would think that you would want to keep your bus running at the recommended speed for the rest of your hardware... maybe I'm wrong...
  • An electrician where I work cautioned me about excessive electromagnetic radiation emissions from an overclocked cpu, and I consider him a far more reliable source than a smug reply from a nobody.
    Electromagnetic radiation (EMR) is omnipresent - it's in your home, car and workplace - and has been linked to many of our modern day illnesses, including cancer. Considering up to 2 milligauss continual radiation exposure per hour is regarded as safe, and a computer monitor alone generates circa 28 milligauss per hour, shouldn't this be a cause for concern? This isn't taking into account photocopy machines, vehicles or cordless/mobile phones that you may have come in contact with either. If you need links to familiarize yourself with EMR, try google.com - I found plenty.

  • I've heard overclocking significantly increases electromagnetic radiation emissions from a computer.
    Granted, we're exposed to small doses of it anyway everytime we use the computer, sleep beside our digital alarm clock, or use any electrical appliance for that matter - but an overclocked cpu/mainboard is said to be at near dangerous levels.
    Is this true?

  • I ran into this. I had a pair of 366 Celerons on a BP-6, payed a bit extra to get pre-tested at 550 chips (before Celerons were availble at 550) and they ran great for months. No problems. Then I tried to run a render on them (actually they were part of a mosix cluster that I ran the render on) and every singe time they would crash the render process. Dropped them back to stock 366 and they ran fine. The render process obviously hit a slow timing path that normal operation didn't.

    AFAIK noone has released a comprehensive stress test program that attempts to stress all possible timeing paths in an inplace CPU, which is what you would have to do, since OCers don't have the timeing info worked out by the engineers.
  • However, one thing that has struck me is that overclocking increases the prices of chips, on the whole. When someone buys a cheap chip, and then OC's it, they are not paying the huge surcharge on the latest technology that everyone else has to, and so they are prolonging those inflated prices. Basic supply and demand, as outlined by Adam Smith, shows that this is irrefutably the case.

    Methinks perhaps you have an interesting view of supply and demand.

    The huge surcharge on the latest technology is not some just some nice little premium the semiconductor manufacturer sticks on to recoup development costs. The way you talk about it, it sounds like you're saying the company adds this surcharge, and then, once they've gotten back their money for developing the high end part, they'll kindly drop the price, because they're nice folks, after all.

    The price of the part reflects what the market will bear, assuming there is reasonable competition. In the x86 processor market, this wasn't the case on high end parts until fairly recently, and as a result, those high end Xeon parts and the like routinely sold at *massive* profit margins.

    With reasonable competition, we fall back into the supply/demand relationship nicely. OCing only reinforces this natural market condition; by running a chip at a faster speed grade than it is rated" you lower the supply curve slightly and push down prices.

    I think most OC'ing is pointless; when there's reasonable competition in the market, chips do tend to get sold at the grade at which they are reliable for normal use. There are exceptions, though, like Intel's Celeron 300A. The 300A was an attempt by Intel to artifically split the market to extract more profit from it; OC'ers actually help defeat this corporate market manipulation.

    The question is one of morals. Myself, I have no particular problem with it. But many people may rightly regard overclocking as cheating, with some good reason. I am happy to admit that I am a cheater - I don't give a shit.

    I'm surprised this is even comes up as an issue. When you buy a chip, you buy a piece of hardware. You've no moral obligation back to the company to use it as they intended or desire. You bought it, you can use it as you like; if they're depending on you not OC'ing so they'll get more money, you're under no obligation, legal, moral, or otherwise, to support that.

    Now resellers who OC systems without full disclosure to their customers are a whole different beast.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    I once underclocked an AST 'Bravo' '286 machine.

    It had the metal rectangular crystal block, and it was socketed. I was curious to see how slow I could make the machine boot up. It started out as an 8 MHz '286 machine, using a 16 MHz crystal. I put in a 4 MHz crystal. It s-l-o-w-l-y went through the POST and booted up. You haven't seen a slow bootup until you've seen the floppy diskette seek go by like a mantel clock. tick-tic-tick as it steps up to track zero and back.

    Then, I plugged in this 32.768 Kilohertz crystal block (the smallest I had on hand). It never booted. There are dynamic registers in the '286, and probably in many other chips on the motherboard, so it wasn't running fast enough to even operate.

    That's what fun is all about, eh?
  • Don't be such a troll. You're making a big assumption that all /. readers/nerds already know about over-clocking. Posting a story is only half of it: the rest is comprised of the discussions that follow. This is stuff that is interesting to nerds, and they to discuss it. Thus it seems relevant. /. posts stuff that is of interest to somebody, but not necessarily everyone... that's what CNN.com is for. Not all nerds have the same interests or expertise, so don't be so judgemental.
  • Yup! I agree. I'm still at 450MHz (P2-450 x 2). I occasionally use computers that have P3-800's in them. When something like MSVC is compiling, I can do virtually nothing on the machine until it's done, e.g. it can take 30 secs for the Start menu to open. So, although the uniprocessor machine gets individual tasks done more quickly than mine, I actually take longer to get things done as the machine is way more unresponsive. I'd rather the task took a little longer if I could do something else in the meanwhile (which I do). Eventually P3-850s will drop below USD$150, and will upgrade with two of those and be set for some time.
  • Sorry, that isn't sufficient to guarantee system reliability. Do you have a $10 million chip tester in your basement?

    My $10 million chip tester is simulated by my own practical needs. If it works, great. If it doesn't, it was just an amusing science experiment. Given enough worst case trials, one can calculate the density of smoke.

    Do it to a business system and the local BOFH will break your legs.

    For one moment, let's please seperate one's place of employment from what they can do in the privacy in their own bedroom. Of course, placing one's employer at great risks for dubious returns is moronic.
  • All CPUs are about chip yield in the baking process. Take a basic design and manufacture it to a given specification and tolerance and run it up to an arbitrary speed until the failure rate is < 3 Sigma. That is the speed rating of the core. Weigh the value of doing that agains the cost of the yield of a given percentage of wafers that can actually pass that test. That is the watermark for the chip you buy. As the manufacturing process gets better the yield at that testing level gets better which drives the unit cost down. Below a certain cost threshold it now becomes economically feasible to step the testing thresshold up higher - eg. a faster speed and rerun all of your tests to the new test limit for the same > 3 Sigma confidence interval.

    Lather Rinse Repeat.

    So when you OC all your doing is throwing the dice that your thresshold will work within the limits of the chip already put through the same tests by the manufacturer. So literally your chances of successfully OCing are better the further into the manufacturing lifecycle you are. That is, you probably couldn't reliably OC a Pentium 60 or 66 w/o setting it afire but Celeron 450 - wooo is that tried and true !
  • "Note that if you overclock your CPU, bus speed, memory bandwith, graphics card performance, network speed and harddisk perfomance are still unchanged"

    Hey You are wrong here. If you overclock by upping the bus speed the Graphics card, and mem bandwidth will increase as well. The network is almost always a bottleneck regardless of CPU. You can saturate a T1 with a 100mhz CPU. So that is not really an argument for OC or not.

  • How is that a bad analogy? When you spend more money on fixing something to be what that extra money could buy in the first place IT IS STUPID. This is the same as if you bought a car or a computer or anything. You wind up just buying the one you should have bought in the first place, or dealing with the problems.

    Buy quality or buy twice.
  • It is light enough that I guess they could have been bouncing it by leaning back and forth real fast...
  • You are 100% correct! :-)

    With the price of AMD Duron CPU's under US$100 even for the 750 MHz versions, trying to make it go even faster is a silly idea unless you're willing to spend the extra money for a decent 300W power supply, a top-quality heatsink/fan, and extra cooling fans inside the system case.

    I'd rather spend the money on getting at least 128 MB of system RAM and a decent 7200 RPM ATA-66/100 hard drive, where the benefits are more immediate (and cheap given the recent prices for 168-pin DIMM's and hard drives). A lot of people forget that with enough RAM you swap far less to the hard drive virtual memory, and with a fast hard drive data can be read off the hard drive a lot faster than the older 5400 RPM drives.
  • Companies should be required to test their chips rigorously and explicitly label them correctly as to their performance capabilities. That's the least the law can require.

    Why in the world would you jump straight for big brother to do this for you?

    Do you call the police when somebody cuts in front of you in line?

    And until then, we should organize boycotts against mendacious chip manufacturers. That's our right as consumers and it'll help give our legal challenges more oomph and grassroots support.

    That is your right, and I encourage you to exercise it. However, you should do so IN LIEU of the legal challenges, not in support of them.

    We have enough laws in this country, let's fix our disputes like adults, not call big brother in to justify a few more million dollars in taxes to support added staff at some government agency enforcing the removal of a minor annoyance.

    -
  • Ok, true. By overclocking, you are probably shortening the life of your CPU, but CPUs and motherboards have a pretty short functional life anyhow.

    How long do you expect to keep your current CPU and motherboard? Are you still using that 30 MHz I386 based computer you bought 10 years ago? Not likely. It's probably sitting, fully functional, in a landfill somewhere. You sure aren't running quake on it, unless you're a masochist.

    If you're planning on keeping your computer for years, then overclocking is a bad idea. However, if you replace your computer, CPU, or motherboard every year to get the hottest new chip, then it doesn't matter if you reduce the life of your CPU from 10 years or more to 18 months. Better to get your money's worth out of it by using it up then to throw it away working perfectly. Old computers have zero resale value anyhow.

    Top race car drivers burn through several sets of tires and wear out an entire engine driving a major race. It's the cost of winning. Think of overclocking as doing the same thing to your computer. It has tradeoffs; it's a cost/benefit situation.

  • So, I underclock the CPU to 100MHz, and have removed the CPU fan. The power-supply fan is disconnected, because the case interior simply does not get hot. There is no disk drive in the machine (it netboots) and the box is totally silent.

    This is so cool! It's like a PC low-rider!
  • whats funny is that people do that with relatively cheap cars all the time. haven't you seen a honda accord with a spoiler? people have their hobbies~overclocking fords and cpu's.

    use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
  • Many many companies do this, it's nothing new.

    A well-known tractor manufacturer sells a three types of tractor each with a different horsepower rating. However, the engines are the same, it's just the electronic controller that makes a difference of a couple hundred thousand dollars.

    Closed consumer devices sometimes have these settings as well... the same software binary is used on all devices to ease maintainance problems, but specific bits are flipped in memory to enable or disable certain functionality.
    --

  • you're too young ... in 1992 i OC/ed my 16Mhz 286 to 22Mhz (replaced the 33Mhz quartz with an 44.6Mhz one (from some burnt video-card or smth)).
    (the machine died after 7 years of heavy usage - overclocking is bad :).
    And in '90 have seen an Z80 Sinclair spectrum compatible overclocked form 3.5Mhz to 6Mhz. It would occasionally lose the front at memory accesses (memory too slow). The fun part was to write a program like:
    10 PRINT SQRT 2
    20 GOTO 10
    let-it run and the flick the switch to 6Mhz - it would began to print strange numbers CLOSE to sqrt(2) and eventually reset/lock itself.

    --
  • Companies should be required to test their chips rigorously and explicitly label them correctly as to their performance capabilities.

    Companies do test and correctly label their chips. When you buy a chip it has a clock value stamped on it. What that means is that the company has tested it at that speed and certifies that it is capable of running at at least that speed. The fact that there is a saftey margin built into this measurement is irrelevant. Everyone knows that there is some degree of saftey margin involved we would consider the product to be faulty if it were rated at 800MHz and burst into flames at 801HMz. The only question is how big is that margin for a given chip and you know that it's going to vary somewhat between different chips, even ones that came from the same wafer. When you make a guarentee on something you'd better be pretty certian that the product you're delivering is actually a bit better than you promise or expect to get a lot of warranty repair work.
    _____________

  • How often do you find that your servers are stuck at 100% CPU usage but you don't also have other problems like 100% RAM usage or a flooded disk sub system?

    If you do find yourself in this situation exactly how much are you going to get from increasing the clock speed. Lets say you get 10% better performance out of the CPU, I frankly would be just as worried with a 90% usage on the CPUs. Just a little bit more load and you're still hosed.

    What you should try is getting SMP servers with extra CPU slots or cluster the boxes.
  • I would like to say I over clock because I need the cycles and it is less expensive than buying a new CPU... However, it is more a hobby than most anything else.

    Consider people who buy a car for $1000 and put $8000 into it, so it is "factory" (circa 1972). Insane? Perhaps, however I look at it like any other interest. If you are willing to spend the time to learn (and there are plenty of places to learn), and you are willing to accept the risk, go for it...

    If you are looking for logic, it can only be found in a few places. My C300A running at 450 saved me a couple hundred when I bought it, and an upgrade. However, I also knew that the chip was solid, the update easy and effective cooling possible (and cheap).

    Other people sky dive and they call me crazy.. ;-)
  • What a content-free article! As far as I can tell, this is the only paragraph that contains any information on the drawbacks of overclocking, and even then is pretty light!

    Knowledgeable overclockers can keep a system running smoothly for years, but risks still abound. The most common overclocking techniques increase the power supplied to everything connected to the motherboard, meaning that graphics processors, hard drives and other components may overheat or perform erratically. But stray cooling fluids can short out components, and a wrong setting or loose screw can wreak havoc.

    I'm interested in overclocking, and I'd like to know what damage I could do if I'm not careful. Can someone who actually knows what they're talking about list some specifc drawbacks to overclocking?

    --
  • Let's overclock this Zilog 80 to 1 GhZ!
  • The best analogy/explanation/justification I've come up with for overclocking and case modding (props to http://www.virtualhideout.net and their case gallery) is the 50's hotrod.

    Just like with hotrods, the joy is also in the DOING, not just the end results. Tinkering with your (carburator|front side bus) for that extra performance... installing a (airscoop|blowhole fan) for extra airflow... decorating it with (racing stripes|neon glowtubes). It's all fun!

    And strangely enough, people in automobile-mad North America accept it really well once the hotrod analogy is explained to them. :)

  • Whenever the wife says I do!

  • You'll also want to underclock your system because by doing so, you'll reduce heat still further.

    Basically you are right but IMHO underclocking can be just as dangerous as overclocking and can lead to undesired instability. The key is to make sure you burn in the processor just as if you are going to overlock before you underclock.
  • Umm, I do not know when you used to OC, but in my recent experience I brought an Athlon from 700 to 950 and never had any stability problems. The key is that the processor actually had a 900Mhz core. You see, at the time AMD was keeping the 700 line because it was selling. But to have a fab for 700, 800, 900, and whatever else they were making would not be cost efficient. So they make all 900 cores for that few weeks of fab and put them in whatever they are selling. I get the 700 for a few hundred cheaper and there ya go, 950 with only a $20 heatsink/fan..

    so, is 250mhz with 100% stability good enough for you?
  • I think you got burned when you bought a cyrix..

    sorry. I had to...
  • by Dman33 ( 110217 )
    First off, your case usually shields from EMR. Secondly, when you OC, you only emit about the same EMR as a processor of that speed. In other words, I have a 700Mhz processor running at 950Mhz. This does not emit much more EMR than a 950Mhz T-bird.

    If this still concerns you, then simply don't do it. In fact, do not use a computer/monitor, do not live near power lines, do not watch TV too closely, do not stand near the microwave, do not get a gas/electric hybrid automobile, do not use a cell phone, do not use a cordless phone, do not put your desk near a wall in your office that has more than one AC outlet...

    Okay, now that is getting carried away but my point is that EMF is everywhere in our world. Yes, some devices produce much more than others however they all add up. From the studies that I have read, the monitor is the most dangerous culprit aside from high-voltage electric wiring. I do not see how an overclocked PC can be much worse unless the case is open and right next to you. If you take the simple precaution of closing up the case and putting it a safe distance from where you sit, you should be fine.
  • Heh. It's fun to be in the position of having more knowledge than most, and say, 'if I missed anything, feel free to correct me...'

    No corrections, but a bit of emphasis. If you overclock, you're going to _significantly_ increase the time-to-failure of a chip, due to circuit trace migration. Run current through a trace on a chip, and the actual metal atoms start to travel away from the trace. This is part of the design limitations, and when you exceed the normal operating specs, you can really crank up the speed at which migration happens. (can't remember the details, but it sure ain't linear!)

    That said, I suspect the MTBF for a modern is somewhere on the order of 20 years. If you shorten the life by 75%, you're still looking at a 5 year life, which as you said is about as long as a processor is likely to be useful anyways.

  • What do you mean when you say "burn in"?
    Most overclockers use Quake, RC5 or SETI after successfully overclocking their machines, but that's just to test stability under extreme stress.

    What's more, chips aren't produced to operate at a specific speed; their performance is controlled by the quality of the process. Better quality means higher tolerance for stress and heat, and chips with a higher tolerance are marked for a higher speed. If you overclock a chip, you're betting that the tolerance is higher than the plant thought. If you underclock it, you get the same speed as another chip, but with a higher tolerance.

    --
  • I don't understand why they're upset about over-clocking (and trying to make it more difficult).

    AFAIK, they don't want underhanded retailers selling overclocked PIII-500's as PIII-700's or whatever. Basically people aren't getting what they're paying for. (Whether there's a real difference or not, I don't claim to know.) And if they don't do it right and they make the chip unstable, it makes the chip manufacturers look bad.

    -Erf C.

  • ...then you shouldn't have any problems.

    I have a p2 (klamath, the hottest of the bunch) overclocked from 233 to 300 with a decent fan/heatsink and I've never had any instability problems.

    I don't know about the kind of heat that the newer cpus put out, but as long as it's properly cooled and ventilated I wouldn't think you'd have any problems at all.

    And of course, YMMV.

    --
  • by Ig0r ( 154739 )
    Clocking a 300A at 450 is safe, at 600 is just stupid.
    You can't reasonably expect a chip to perform twice it's rated speed reliably.

    --

  • You are not recognizing that some overclockers get a lot more than "2-5 percent" out of their systems. Look at all the people who got their Celeron 300A's running at 450MHz. That's a huge speed gain and a savings of hundreds of dollars. There are plenty of more current examples too.

    Overclocking does have a place, and as long as there is any "slop" in processor speed ratings it always will.

  • Some good mobos have special settings to lock the PCI bus speed at 33MHz. Without such a feature, you are likely to run into problems, just like you did.

    My Abit BH6 lets me boost my FSB speed to 100MHz (from 66MHz) while keeping the PCI bus at 33MHz. No stability problems.

    Selecting the proper hardware is crucial. If you read up, it's possible to get some serious gains, save money, AND have a stable system.

  • That's a load of BS.

    If you have any links, please post them for everyone's entertainment.
  • Curiously, you know how scientists make liquid oxygen? They cool it down using liquid nitrogen. The boiling point of nitrogen is approximately 77 kelvin whereas the boiling point for oxygen is about 90 kelvin.

    Also a curious fact, oxygen is paramagnetic- meaning it will orient itself in line with a magnet. A really neat experiment with liquid oxygen is dribble it into a really strong magnet field and watch it stick to one of the sides.
  • Everytime there is a story about overclocking on Slashdot the naysayers flood the forums with comments about how terrible an idea it is to overclock. They say things like "You only save a little bit and spend more on cooling..." or "Your chip will be unstable and then have a shorter life."

    Also, I would like to point out that those who think that overclocking is simply stupid, they should look at the current state of the hardware industry. They, in a sensem overclock their chips all of the time. That's why they need more cooling apparatus. Its part of the design of the chip.

    Even more damning is the new thing with copper leads. You hear great things about it making a faster chip, but if you talk to a materials engineering undergrad, he'll tell you that the people designing those chips don't know if the copper is going to diffuse into the insulation and cause failure in the next 3 years or not. The fact of the matter is that these companies are pushing barriers to be competitive, and if a person is smart enough and interested enough to try, they can expand the efforts of the manufacturer even more.. After all, a 400 MHz chip is typically the same as a 500MHz chip of the same model, its just that ones passed certain QC tests while the others didn't.. So if you have a 400 MHz chip, its quite possible that it will be stable at a higher clock, if you bother to extensively test it and monitor its temperature. You can afford to do more rigorous testing on an individual CPU than Intel or AMD can when they ship thousands of these things at a time.

  • Am I the only one here that thinks that a C|Net article on OCing has no bearing to most of the slashdot community?

    Well, I'm a member of the Slashdot community, and I know next to nothing about serious overclocking -- least of all the complicated cooling systems involved in it. I got a good oversight from the article, and a better one from the ensuing discussion here. Not *all* nerds and geeks practice overclocking, you know; some just do code.

    In addition, C|Net provided a heap of external and internal links to additional overclocking information in the right-hand bar of the story. So if you wanted to know more, they gave you plenty of more-authoritative places to go.

    As a postscript, that's only half the reason I submitted this story to Slashdot. The other half was to see what it finally took to get a story admitted by Slashdot, since my last eight eclecticly-chosen submissions were rejected while a duplicate article on Napster was posted just yesterday by an editor who didn't know how to use his own site's search engine. My conclusion: the only thing I did with this submission that I didn't do with the others was submit it as early in the day as possible. *shrug*

  • The key to overclocking without blowing your hardware is to do it _conservatively_. Altering your CPU voltage in .5 V increments is likely to blow your CPU. Adjusting your FSB 1 Mhz at a time would be extremely unlikely to hurt anything (unless your CPU is already mostly toast) except stability, and you can always revert those changes when your system gets too flaky.

    My suggestion to those who are interested in getting started is to get a motherboard with a good reputation in the OC space (Abit KA/KT7, actually, pretty much anything from Abit, recent Asus boards are also good) and READ. Read a lot. The Unofficial Abit KA7 FAQ [icrontic.com] and others like it for your mainboard will be invaluable sources of information. Like hacking software, overclocking will teach you a lot about your hardware. The idea of "overclocking safely" is simply to gain this knowledge without frying your hardware!

    Once you're into it, you might find the Cerberus Test Control System [sourceforge.net] useful for overclocking under Linux. (shameless-author-plug). It will ruthlessly beat your system into submission with tests that will stress the core system components most often tuned in overclocking.

  • Most people who don't overclock act like overclocking a CPU is some kind of geeky insanity bordering on the unethical. But most people who do overclock don't put half a car in their computer case...

    It's usually like this: I had a $160 budget for my CPU and heat-sink combo. Instead of buying a T-bird 900 for $148 and an $8 heat-sink/fan to go with it, I bought a $118 T-bird 850 and a $29.00 Taisol heat-sink/fan to go with it. No anti-freeze, no crazy hardware, just a larger hunk of steel and a larger diameter fan.

    Then, I experimented once I got the 850 CPU to see what I could clock it at. At 1100 MHz, it wouldn't POST or boot. At 1050 MHz, it would boot and run stable under loads, temperature measured (by simple onboard hardware) at about 43 degrees celsius.

    So, I backed it down to 1000 MHz in the interest of ensuring stability, ran a continuous 3D benchmark on it for 120 hours straight to make sure it didn't crash or overheat at that speed, and then put it into service. For the same price as a slower T-bird 900 and a cheaper heat-sink/fan, I now own a T-bird running at 1.0 GHz at around 39-40 degrees celsius, well within the rated temperature range for the T-bird Athlon processor as per AMD specs.

    No aquarium pumps, no sawing, no bending, puncturing, no hazardous substances... My case remains quiet and the sides are all on. The processor runs an MPEG-2 encoder under Linux 24/7 and has done so very well for months now.

    THIS is how most overclockers work, I think, and it's not insane at all. It's called getting the most for your buck. For those of you who think it's unethical... Well... Be sure to always buy your hard drive upgrades direct from Compaq, rather than from a third-party, "aftermarket" hard drive dealer. But hard drive's are more expensive that way, you say?

    Hey, it's in your paperwork. Always use only genuine Compaq parts for upgrades. To do anything else is to break The Rules[TM].

  • Yeah? Well I overclocked my watch! I'm NEVER late for anything anymore!

    Nyah!

  • Yeah, right. Almost identicle.

    When's the last time a hot girl wanted to ride shotgun on your PC? Now hold on! I'm about to login!

    It's cool to juice up anything but not the same....... 'nuff said

  • While I can understand where you come from, I would have to say I disagree. The OC community is so far in the minority of chip buyers that it's laughable. IOW, the ratio of OC'ers:Non-OC'ers is so low that Intel/AMD don't even care. It's like the record industry going after kids for watching DVD's on their linux boxes. oops....:-)

    seriously though, I see OC'ers hurting Intel's/AMD profits as the same as a kid who spits in the atlantic and worrys about coastal flooding. Besides, if it was such a big deal that it was hurting profits, Intel/AMD would go after mobo makers.
    /me knocks on wood
    "Me Ted"
  • With insanely fast CPUS available for ridiculously cheap prices, why bother? It's kind of like buying a ford Focus, and spend a lot of money and time souping up the engine. Just buy a fast car (chip) if you need one! Am I missing something?

  • This much is true. But Intel also underclocks chips that could run faster based on supply and demand.

    They also overclock the hell out of some (few) stable chips and cool them, and sell them for big bucks.

    ...and then they introduce hardware to stop you from doing the same.

    No sir, I don't like it, not one little bit.
  • Optimize the configuration of your apps, os , and code. If all of our code was tightly optimized for the tasks we have at hand in internet servers, over convenience and general flexibility, we would need much less horsepower under the hood. I see highly optimized applications on a pc outperform similar apps on the largest enterprise sun machines, due to their great design. We don't need 3000mhz to handle most of our applications, we need better code. of course exceptions always apply, but im giving a general rule of thumb in the ISP/ASP industry. worst coding i've ever seen.
  • Plus: The $300 and 30 hours you spent ekeing and extra 8% out of your processor has helped your frag average by 13%!

    Peril: When was the last time you got laid?

    OK,
    - B
    --

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Actually the reason chip testers cost millions is that they must be carefully designed to work fast and be very complete. The factory can't afford to leave it running for a week running some program that does nothing but exercise the cache and FPU in every possible way.

    It has been axiomatic since the earliest days of computing that the best way to test a configuration is to run it for an extended period of time. The factory doesn't do this because it can't afford to. The overclockers are doing exactly what companies like IBM and Data General used to do to prove their designs. Go back and read Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine and tell me an overclocker can't do a better job than those engineers did of getting reliability out of their systems.

  • You ever take apart an engine, chop or channel her or manybe drop a 470hp engine and do the 1/4 in 9.7 seconds flat.
    Down here in Newark NJ, I see guys with outright race cars that pull low 10's down to mid 9's and they make a living off of racing on the street.

    Talk about hacking a car. These guys are using Mazda motors imported from Japan, The guy's in japan get them from the junk yard (motors not produced for USA). Hell they even give the guys on bike's a run for there money ( block to clock racing )

    Don't mock these guys, they are the same as overclockers, just in a differnt game. Plus it's cool to post your best time on your window and get the bragging rights.

    ONEPOINT


    spambait e-mail
    my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop news
    please help me make it better
  • If you want more memory, you open the case and put in more memory chips.

    If you want more disk space, you open the case and add another hard disk.

    So if you want an extra 33-200MHz, why not open the case and toss in a spare 486 or two? I've got an old Dell 486 at home if you're interested...

  • You've got to be kidding. You're suggesting that everytime I install some blorb of code that I need for *whatever* reason, from some kind of domain security package to a cron job in perl to move a file from one directory to the other once a day forever needs to be personally re-tooled (re-compiled, essentially, don't tell me you can do decent optimizations of anything without a re-build) by me. You have forever? I don't. That's a cynical, and typically geek attitude. The real world doesn't have the time, the patience, or the expertise for that kind of nonsend. You are suggesting that everytime a bridge be built each part be built with tweezers and micometer. No f-ing way. Ain't gonna happen Gungadin. How much of the "smart thing" is the onus of the programmer/designer, at least within the context of a level platform (one code line?) Certainly I have to give creedance to x-platform compatibility and the misfires that come from trying to optimize once-compiled code, but come on... you ultra-geeks have to realize there is a larger world out there, one that doesn't give a whit about "properly" optimizing a code chuck.
  • by ChaosDiscord ( 4913 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:31PM (#391433) Homepage Journal
    That's what I don't get. I always chuckle when I see a Geo Metro driving down the road that has been souped up with those stupid wider wheels, detailing, hydralics, custom interior, etc. For the money they spent to do that, they could have actually bought a car instead of fixing up a go-cart.

    However, they know know their car, inside and out. They can tell you exactly what each bit is for, how it worked when they got the car, how it works now, and why it's better. They know the limitations of their car intimately. They've gained real world experience in hacking on cars and enjoyed themselves to boot. What's so silly about that? It's the process that's important, not the results. What is cool is that it was done. The same holds true for computer overclockers.

  • by ErikZ ( 55491 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:24PM (#391434)
    That's nothing. My friend knows a guy who overclocked, and his LEG FELL OFF!!!!

    Don't do it! It's too risky!

    Later,
    ErikZ
  • by NetJunkie ( 56134 ) <{jason.nash} {at} {gmail.com}> on Thursday March 01, 2001 @01:15PM (#391435)
    I love to work with hardware. To me overclocking is a lot of fun. Sure, I could go buy a 1.2GHz Ahtlon, but I rather push my 1GHz to 1.2. Some people like to hack code, I like to mess with hardware.

    A lot of people don't OC because they think it causes instability. If a system is not stable after being overlcocked, then it isn't a success! If my system is one bit less stable than before, the speed goes back down.
    Most OCers put their systems through serious torture tests to make sure they are stable. I bet most normal users don't do any tests like that.

    So..in the end I get a faster system and several hours of enjoyment. It's fun to put on a new fan and lower the CPU temp by 2C. ;)
  • by bconway ( 63464 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @11:45AM (#391436) Homepage
    I have far too many machines that I need 24/7 access to, many of them remotely, to risk stability for an increase in speed. While it's true that overclocking reduces the lifetime of products by such an insignificant amount (assuming you don't fry them) that they'll still die long after they've outlived their use, I'd still prefer not needing to drive an hour away just because my machine overheated from being clocked up an extra 50 mhz or so.
  • by Shoden ( 94398 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:56PM (#391437)
    This post was copied almost verbatim (first sentence was changed) from a post back on Feb 20th in the Building The Fastest Desktop Possible [slashdot.org] article.
  • by Ser\/o ( 105187 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:47PM (#391438) Journal
    Hardly. To recap a few overclocking endeavors:

    My linux server is a meager Pent 200 OC to 250. Not much, but I can 'feel' the difference. No extra cooling etc. needed.

    2 OC celeron 300's @450/500. No extra anything, and I saved a few hundred bucks.

    Present main system is a t-bird 700 OC to 1050. The only extra items are a $25 FOP38 HSF, and a couple old case fans I had in a box. Runs about 5-8 degrees warmer OC. Again, this saved me several 100 bucks at the time I built it.

    There have been a couple others I don't remember specifics on (166 to 208 etc). But in the long run, I was out a $25 HSF, a little bit of 'tinker time', and $3 for some good thermal grease. Now if I wanted to go water-cooled, or some such, it would be much more expensive, but this is not necessary to save considerable cash. I view the whole water-cooled/peltier side of OC as a hobby. I'd never run one of these as a server, but for fun....why not? I've spent 2-3 hundred bucks on things for more frivolous, as I figure most people have.

    In the long run, I've saved enough cash that my next PC (if I OC again) will be paid for with all the money I've saved over time. I certainly smile when I think about that.

  • by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:49PM (#391439) Journal
    Nude Overclockers [cwc.net]

    Really! This is not a joke.
  • by Jon Erikson ( 198204 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @11:50AM (#391440)
    I like overclocking, and all my home computers are overclocked to hell. I even have an Athlon O/C/ed to 1600MHz using a tower refrigeration system, which greatly outpreforms the P4 at 1500MHz. The coolant system cost 400 pounds sterling, but the cost of the 1.2GHz Athlon + Coolant system was significantly less than the cost of a P4. So I like OC'ing.

    However, one thing that has struck me is that overclocking increases the prices of chips, on the whole. When someone buys a cheap chip, and then OC's it, they are not paying the huge surcharge on the latest technology that everyone else has to, and so they are prolonging those inflated prices. Basic supply and demand, as outlined by Adam Smith, shows that this is irrefutably the case.

    The question is one of morals. Myself, I have no particular problem with it. But many people may rightly regard overclocking as cheating, with some good reason. I am happy to admit that I am a cheater - I don't give a shit.

    Still, I can hardly blame the hardware companies for multiplier locking chips - if the problem didn't exist, they wouldn't have to.

    But so what. In the end, I'm an OC'er, and proud.

  • by Blitherakt! ( 199326 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @11:26PM (#391441)
    The drawbacks to overclocking are really few, if you're careful. For example, overclocking my early Athlon (Slot A) from 550 to 750 megahertz was quite a process. The packaging wasn't meant to be opened and the processor was "locked" to the 550 setting with some surface mount resistors. Overclocking this monster required cracking (literally, not figuratively) the sealing tabs from the plastic case and some dainty surgery with a very high quality soldering iron. If I hadn't been overclocking for several years, I wouldn't have attempted it.

    The Athlon was also bleeding-edge overclocking; they now have a device for $20 to $50 US that will allow you to overclock a Slot A Athlon without cracking the case and desoldering and resoldering resistors.

    The only real drawback I've seen to overclocking is the possiblity of frying your processor, motherboard or other components. The person who got me into overclocking toasted 6 Abit BP6 motherboards trying to figure out how to get a Coppermine Celeron to work in the board. While studing the pin diagrams and attempting to reroute traces on the motherboard isn't the norm, it does happen.

    Aside from horror stories like the one above, there are two things to watch for when overclocking: heat and over-voltage.

    As for heat, don't skimp on the heat sinks and check a page like [H]ard|OCP or Toms Hardware (links below) for heatsink information, case modifications and the like.

    Voltage can be trickier to deal with. As bus and processor speeds become higher and higher, the transistor count rises and, hence, the current required by the processor, chipset and other components of the system. Modern processors lower the voltage significantly in order to conserve current. Some processors require 2 volts (or less!) in the core. If you're familiar with electronics at all, you'll soon see that the signal to noise ratio becomes a real factor. The solution is to increase the signal by raising the voltage. It's a tightrope act; raise the voltage too high and you could fry your chip in microseconds, not high enough and it doesn't add any noise rejection but does add heat.

    Something that used is cited as a factor now that I don't really find relavent is processor life. Transistors do not last forever. Stuff that goes on at the quantum level degrades the PNP/NPN junctions over time. Granted, in most situations this can be over the course of years or decades, but with transistors as small as those in a typical processor die, it's generally on the lines of 5 to 7 years. That's if you run them at the manufacturer's suggested voltage. Increase the voltage, decrease the life.

    That being said, with processors doubling in speed every 18 months or so, I don't really see any current chip being in service on a desktop 7 years from now. Even if you were to cut the operating life of your processor in half from 7 to 4.5 years, would it matter much? Incedentally, I have a Linux box here running on a Pentium 166MMX overclocked to 233. I bought the processor and motherboard in '97 or '98, if I remember correctly. It's been on 24/7 for all but the few days it took to move from California to Phoenix.

    If you're interested in overclocking, the best way to get into it is to search the hardward sites, read their guides and try it.

    It will also help to know a bit more about the x86 architecture. For example, understanding the workings of SDRAM fetch settings in your BIOS, how to figure out the PCI bus speed after overclocking your motherboard's bus from 133 to 145 and so on. [H]ard|OCP [hardocp.com] and Toms Hardware [tomshardware.com] (links I promised above =) have some very good information on just that sort of thing.

    If I missed anything or blew a couple of concepts, feel free to offer a friendly correction. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!

    Good luck!

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:13PM (#391442)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by DeadInSpace ( 320683 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @01:15PM (#391443)
    Note that if you overclock your CPU, bus speed, memory bandwith, graphics card performance, network speed and harddisk perfomance are still unchanged.

    Those factors are often the bottlenecks of your system. For example, Quake3 performance depends *heavily* on graphics card performance, running graphical apps over the network eats network performance (duh), running lots of apps simultaniously eats ram, and if you're doing a kernel compile, you'll want a fast HD and lots of ram (granted, a fast CPU helps here, too).

    My point here is that CPU speed is rarely a bottleneck for me, so it's not worth the cost, time and risks of overclocking. So, I'm not saying it's not a fun hobby, but I don't think its very useful to OC just for the sake of a faster computer.

    ------------

    ----
  • by Stan Chesnutt ( 2253 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:45PM (#391444) Homepage
    in order to reduce noise & electrical consumption. For example, I have a baby-AT system with a Pentium 200MMX processor. It needs to run in a quiet environment.

    So, I underclock the CPU to 100MHz, and have removed the CPU fan. The power-supply fan is disconnected, because the case interior simply does not get hot. There is no disk drive in the machine (it netboots) and the box is totally silent.

    Just goes to show ... faster ain't always better.
  • by jidar ( 83795 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:22PM (#391445)
    Everytime there is a story about overclocking on Slashdot the naysayers flood the forums with comments about how terrible an idea it is to overclock. They say things like "You only save a little bit and spend more on cooling..." or "Your chip will be unstable and then have a shorter life."

    I would like to clear some things up about overcloking for the uninformed people.

    Firstly, the stability issue. Overclockers hate instability. Most of us go way out of our way to make sure that the system we are running is not going to be acting all flaky when we overclock. The whole point of overclocking is to get the most out of the system, and if your system is freezing all of the time you aren't getting much out of it are you? We accomplish this by running benchmarks and torture tests to make sure that the overclock isn't adversely affecting performance or stability, if it is then we step it off.

    Second, with the exception of a few extreme instances, most overclockers save money for the same performance. We don't all go out and buy peltiers and liquid cooled heatsinks. Most of us spend more on cooling than the average person but not by much, and our cooling system usually lasts through several cpus. Compare the $50 hsf I'm using now with your $10, so I spent $40 more than average, big deal, I saved $300 on the cpu and I'll use this cooler with my next upgrade too.

    Which brings me to the savings. We save a lot of money for the performance. When I purchased my Celeron300A I spent $109 for it and after I overclocked it, the performance I got out of the chip in games at the time was almost identicle to a P2-450 which was selling for well over $600.
    Now thats about as good as overclocking gets, but there are many other examples of chips since then that have done almost as well.

    That celeron300a I spoke of is still running at the same overclocked speed as the day I put it in, and it's rock solid. You want stability, there you go.

    On top of all of this, overclocking is fun! No really. It's an enjoyable experience, you learn a lot about hardware, and at the end of the day you can be happy that you have a screaming fast system for a fraction of the price you could have spent.

    If you want to think about overclocking try checking out some of the sites around the net:
    www.overclockers.com [overclockers.com]
    www.hardocp.com [hardocp.com]
    www.anandtech.com [anandtech.com]
    www.tomshardware.com [tomshardware.com]

    Try it, you might like it.
  • by molo ( 94384 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @11:51AM (#391446) Journal
    Am I the only one here that thinks that a C|Net article on OCing has no bearing to most of the slashdot community? C|Net has a reputation for barely technical articles, glossing over subjects and missing out on all the important details. The real details are available (and have been for a long time) on sites like AnandTech, Tom's Hardware and others. Besides, most of the /. crowd already knows about overclocking and is not going to benefit from a story like this. This is not news for nerds. This is not stuff that matters. If I could moderate this story, it would definately get a -1, Redundant.
  • by hburch ( 98908 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:08PM (#391447)
    It's not fraud. They guarantee that their chips will work at X Hz. They presumably stand behind that claim. If you want to run at 1.3*X, go ahead, but that's not the specs, so it may work or it may not.

    Almost every industry does this. You overengineer a device, so that flaws that occur during the manufacturing process don't break down the guarantee.

    If I see a sign that says `2 ton limit' on a bridge, it better take 2 tons. In fact, I'd be unhappy if it had problems with 2.5 tons.

    I don't understand why they're upset about over-clocking (and trying to make it more difficult). Yes, you can buy a 1 GHz processor and over clock it to 1.2 GHz (or whatever the number is...I don't OC, so don't use these numbers as a basis for OC planning). Alternatively, you could pay for that 1.3 GHz processor and OC it to 1.5 GHz. In my mind, the manufacturers should be out there challenging people to OC their processors, so that they learn the actual limits of their processors, find new ideas on cooling, encourage OC'ers to buy the top-of-the-line and make it run better.

  • by DESADE ( 104626 ) <slashdot&bobwardrop,com> on Thursday March 01, 2001 @11:52AM (#391448)
    The article missed one of the coolest elements of the overclocking phenomena. Overclockers today are like the hot rodders of the 50's and 60's. Ask them why they spend hours and dollars to crank out that extra 2-5 percent and they will look at you like you just don't get it.

    There will always be a base of people who want to push their toys/hobbies to the limit. We've moved from cars to bikes to boats and now PC's.
  • by Animats ( 122034 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:57PM (#391449) Homepage
    I prefer underclocking. The allowable temperature range goes up and the MTBF gets better. Many industrial PCs are underclocked about 20% for exactly those reasons. This will assume more importance this summer when California will have to go without air conditioning to conserve power.

    Hobbyist underclocking is starting to take off. The MP3mobile [chaos.org.uk], a home-built MP3 player for autos, involved a Pentium 166 underclocked to 125MHz. Automotive hardware is often underclocked; the thermal and power environment of the auto is fierce.

    As for the gamers, they're probably better off getting a graphics card upgrade. The current generation of graphics boards are essentially overclocked already; current NVidia products have heat sinks on the RAM.

  • by Asikaa ( 207070 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:05PM (#391450) Homepage
    In a White House press release earlier today, the true reason for cancelling the NASA mission to Pluto [slashdot.org] was revealed.

    George W Bush had discovered that Tom Leufkens had struck a secret deal with NASA to ship his 500MHz Celeron to Pluto, where he believed the surface temperature would allow him to run the machine at 3.3GHz.

    Bush, the current champion overclocker (his Hillary-Clinton-cooled P75 benchmarked 900MHz last Friday) foiled the world-record attempt just in time.

    In a statement, Bush was reported as saying "Ain't no pissin' on the presedential PC."

    Asikaa

  • by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:20PM (#391451) Homepage Journal
    So after attaching the liquid nitrogen cooler to the peltier cooler and waterproofing the mother board with silicone bathtub caulk, what did you do next?

    I put it in a Frigidaire freezer side.

    Go on...

    Which I tried to bury in a snowdrift.

    Which was because...?

    The Frigidaire was smoking.

    I see... and what did you hope to gain from all this

    33 more MHz.

    to...

    1367MHz.

    That is quite impressive for an 80286.

    It's like an addiction, doctor, I just can't stop!

    There, there. We'll break this addiction, it just takes time.

    Thanks, Doc, do you think my girlfriend will ever come back?

    Perhaps, but in the meantime, I have this old Pentium II, what do you think you could do with it?

    --

  • by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:42PM (#391452) Homepage Journal
    OK - I'm a chip designer I have some experience making manufacturable chips - let me explain how this stuff works ....

    When you build a new chip you build software models of the entire chip - right down to the gate and polygon level, you do a LOT of timing analysis - these days we extract the polygons and do 3d parasitic extraction - this takes a long time (days for a big chip) - but the results are by their nature statistical - because the results of building a particular chip are somewhat staistical (depends on etch rates, temp, etc etc at the fab) so we calculate the worst case fast and worst case slow process corners and use the timing tools to check all the potential timing paths (thing combinatorial explosion here). After we think we have something that will make timing we build some - at the fab at the begeinning we get the fab guys to explicitly vary the process to push some wafers into each 'corner' of the process - then we bring those die into the lab and use them to make sure that they will work at speed within the various temp ranges the chip is supposed to work at.

    One of the problems with making chips is that testing them is VERY expensive - the testing machines that do die and chip sorting cost millions of $$ and the number of seconds a die spends on one effects the final cost - so you design your tests to uncover raw defects (via scan and maybe functional tests) and speed problems by using the results of your original timing imulations to identify the timing paths that are so close to the edge that they are likely to fail first - because the testers don't have access to most of the internal nodes you have to do things like overclocking by say 10% and then hoping the internal logic will fail in some manner that you can catch (you also use the previous lab work to validate this approach by identifying known bad chips and making sure they fail on the tester).

    One thing you can do is 'bin' chips - test them at different frequencies and sell the ones that happen to be faster for more - because binning is a more expensive process its usually only done for CPUs and other expensive sorts of chips.

    What commonly happens over the lifetime of a chip is that as the process improves the number of die that fall into the faster bins increases - however for marketting reasons a company may wish to continue to sell the 'faster' ones at a premium so it will label some fast chips as 'slower' so to keep their product mix in the market (a fancy way of saying 'so they can make more money'). I'm told the same thing happens with olive oil :-)

    Now the chips are vey carefully screened and carefull spec sheets are written for them - you buy an 850MHz chip from AMD or Intel and it will work at 850 within the appropriate voltage/temp range specified on the data sheet (if not as, we've seen, Intel will recall chips that don't) - it's not in the chip manufacturer's interest to sell chips that don't work - they get soldered on to expensive boards and expensive system which have to be trashed at the OEM if they don't work - those data sheets make sure that to parts in a million those chips work as advertised.

    Having said that - some chips do run faster if overclocked - you can always tell which ones - because you don't know which process corner the die was fabbed at - or what the binning policies were the day it was manufactured etc etc - even worse yet - and here's my traditional warning - WARNING - your overclocked CPU may work perfectly for months because what you're doing may not exercise the slowest timing path(s) in the design (remember combinatorial explosion!) - you might play quake for months on end without a problem .... then silently drop $1000 off your tax refund ....

  • by yamla ( 136560 ) <chris@@@hypocrite...org> on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:29PM (#391453)
    While I fundamentally agree with you, it is never worth overclocking mission-critical (i.e. work) systems, you should realise that overclocking is not really a natural category.

    If you buy a 1000 Mhz machine for a mission-critical system and simply cannot afford any downtime, you'll almost certainly want to use better cooling (the same cooling overclockers use) on the CPU, chipset, et al. You'll also want to underclock your system because by doing so, you'll reduce heat still further.

    So you could still find overclocking techniques useful even if you do not overclock.

    --

  • by the_other_one ( 178565 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @11:47AM (#391454) Homepage

    Let's see what happens when I try this liquid oxyge...

  • by MeowMeow Jones ( 233640 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @11:47AM (#391455)
    Pro:

    Save $100 on a chip.

    Con:

    Spend $300 on cooling gear.
  • by oconnorcjo ( 242077 ) on Thursday March 01, 2001 @02:23PM (#391456) Journal
    Right now I have a 600MHZ athlon and it sounds like an airconditioner is running in my study. So if I got a 1.2 GHZ cpu and ran it at say 700-850 MHZ, I could theoretically take the fan out of my box (but keep the heatsink), use less electricity and it would last longer (besides being faster than my current cpu). Is there a downside to my logic that I am not seeing? My view of cpu's needing any/better cooling technology is to me an indication that cpu manufacturers ARE over-clocking thier cpus... just not as much as enthusiast do. Is there a reason why Intel/AMD/Cyrix etc... need better cooling besides the HZ war:
    if (MyCPU.MHZ > Other.MHZ) {
    BankAccount = (BankAccount + BetterSales)
    }
  • by megaduck ( 250895 ) <dvarvelNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Thursday March 01, 2001 @12:05PM (#391457) Journal
    ...until you've seen a 386 boot at 400 Mhz. It won't run, but it'll boot.
    God, I love the smell of silicon in the morning!

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