Athlon Overclocking - The AfterBurner 193
NoWhere Man writes "Over at RB Computing (an AMD-only shop in Ottawa, Canada), they are distributing the AfterBurner, an Athlon Overclocking card, developped by Golden Fingers. It offers on-the-fly frequency and core voltage modifications, that is a reasonable alternative to building your own, as shown at Tom's Hardware Guide. "
Cost-effective? (Score:2)
Or, am I missing something?
Overclock Wars? (Score:1)
I know that the AMD chips that are currently coming out overclock pretty well, but I'm wondering if the new "Merced" or whatever Intel is going to call it now is going to be so responsive to overclocking. My friends claim that P2s and P3s are pretty crappy for overclocking, but Celerons seem to be good. Is the new chip from intel going to overclock well?
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
Afterburner (Score:2)
Rock-on, but won't this (can this?) hurt AMD's sales for the high-priced, high-speed chips?
Re:Linux? (Score:1)
Re:Linux? (Score:2)
Review (Score:3)
Re:Cost-effective? (Score:1)
Well, I don't think any SMP Athlon motherboards are out there yet. This is something you can do right now.
---
Re:Linux? (Score:1)
i doubt it but he could be talking about the following...
from http://www.rbcomputing.com/ab/afterburner.html
UPDATE: Word is, software will be coming available to adjust the L2 divider through software shortly. RB Computing will keep you updated!
Old News (Score:2)
The hard-wired multipiler lock of the Athlon (and awful motherboard support, you can't argue that) were the only reasons keeping me from upgrading to an Athlon. Instead I'm using a Coppermine 500E and I have it overclocked to 700MHz (5.0*140) on a Soyo 6BA+ III motherboard with an IWill Slotket II.
Crippling the L2 for the sake of the core? (Score:3)
I'm no overclocking master, but are they suggesting you cut the L2 cache speed from 1/2 core to 1/3 core? Why on earth would you do that? Let's say your core frequency is 800 MHz, and your L2 runs at 400. If you overclock it to 900 but your L2 cache is only running at 300, surely you're getting worse performance overall than you were before...
Is this just another example of the blind worship of the almighty MHz? I think this is the first time I've seen anyone sacrifice performance for higher core processor frequencies...
Or have I just forgotten everything from my architecture class?
Re:Cost-effective? Depends (Score:1)
Re:Cost-effective? (Score:2)
ID was looking into it, but I don't believe they shipped the hacks with Q3A. Anyone know what happened with this?
Cool (Score:1)
Cheers,
Perrin.
Motherboards an issue? (Score:1)
Just about every computer store in Ottawa (Canada) has the K7M in stock. Even the onboard VIA audio just recently got inserted into the Linux Kernel (although I prefer the good ol' Sound Blaster).
I fail to see how the motherboard issue remains.
Kind of pricey (Score:2)
Wow, that seems steep considering the cost of the
parts.
I've modified a couple of Athlon 500s (which both
turned out to actually be 650's based on the legend on the chip itself) to overclock at 750.
It just involves moving a few SMT resistors. This
board just gives you easier access to selections that are already possible.
Re:Crippling the L2 for the sake of the core? (Score:2)
AMD market share (Score:2)
Seems to be rising. Anyone with other numbers?
Re:Crippling the L2 for the sake of the core? (Score:2)
Start at a lower frequency (Score:2)
I bet a fair number of 500Mhz Athlon cores can do 750Mhz but are held back by the cheaper L2 cache they run. Getting a 750Mhz chip at the cost of a 500 aint too bad, even if it isn't as fast as the "real" Athlon 750s.
The race for the MHz (Score:1)
The amount (and speed) of RAM as well as the speed of the HD and accompanying bus are equally important. Otherwise, Linux (or Windows 2000) will load just as slow as a Pentium 200 with 128 MB. But most people ignore this.
The almighty MHz. Some people's friend. Some people's ennemy.
Re:Except this (Score:1)
Any resources for totally lazy OC-wannabe bums? (Score:2)
Well, I don't wanna. I'm too lazy. I've got this aging Pentium Pro/200 system that's slow by todays standards, but which has served me quite well, and actually I just don't wanna mess with hardware anymore.
This doesn't mean I don't want to *own* the fruits of such activities, though. I'd love to have the absolute screamingest machine that a couple G's could buy, and I'm sure there's someone out there that would be happy to provide such an elite box o' power for a small price.
Point is, does anyone know of any companies that build these sorta monster boxes, or is it just better to go with a good quality hardware vendore like VA Systems or something like that for my 'leet hardware needs?
Wow - I was JUST reading this today! (Score:1)
Not sure I'd buy it though, $125 is pretty expensive.
I just got my new Athlon system, 500mhz on a Asus K7 motherboard. It's great. A lot of the modifications towards overclocking can be done through the BIOS setup - very cool
This is really a great chip and I'm happy to give my business to AMD. I looked at the Intel chips and everything pointed to the Athlon.
You can always visit the manufacturer... (Score:1)
The $125 Canadian from the Ottawa store is cool for us Canadians though.
The source of the overclocking fad. (Score:2)
However, it was entirely sensible when Intel released a whole pile of Celerons which were perfectly capable of running at half again their stock speed, with no special cooling hardware.
It didn't make sense not to to overclock, in that case. Intel's marketing department decided to lie to everyone about what these chips could do so they wouldn't cut into their high-margin market.
However, chip manufacturers have now learned their lesson: a few people will always test to see if their chip is really as slow as the spec say, and if they learn otherwise they'll tell everyone else over the internet. So they will build their chips to run slower if they want a slow chip to sell at a cheap price, and make damn sure that there is no cost-effective way to run it faster. The golden days of overclocking are over.
Why Overclock? (Score:1)
Re:Motherboards an issue? (Score:1)
Waste of money. (Score:1)
SMP not what it's cracked up to be.. (Score:3)
q3a supports SMP, only in WinNT. I bought q3a expecting SMP code to be in there for linux, but Carmack doesn't think it's nessecary to have SMP in linux. That rant is for another day though =) I grabbed Win2k early to get a natvie DirectX and SMP support. The only thing I saw was complicated aps taking 50% cpu power. I never got the voodoo 3 driver to work in WIn2k quite right, so I didn't benchmark q3a with SMP(the drivers from NT game palace is you must know)
Kernel compiles in linux only take a couple minues, but that's about the only real use I get out of SMP. Linux distributes the processes wekk enough, but I rarely do something that really taxes the machine, besides q3a and compiling kernels. And GCC is the only thing that uses both. About the only REAL benafit, is that I can run GCC with only one job, and it doesn't tie down the system.
With just about every OS now supporting SMP, including WIn2k, OS X, linux, etc., when will companies start writing apps that take advantage of it? Is Win9x holding SMP back because it doesn't support it?
Concurrency matching (Score:2)
If you don't match the concurrency of your memory link with the concurrency of your clients (i.e. processors), you're hosed for any demanding application.
What do I mean by memory link concurrency? It could come from crossbar versus bus, or multi-ported memories, or from multibanked (interleaved) memories.
Cray has zillion-banked memories. Processors now have multi-banked caches, because there are lots of things going on at once inside out-of-order issue processors!
It's all about concurrency matching!!
nick
I'm all for overclocking, but... (Score:2)
http://www.kryotech.com/Products/superg/Tech_Sp
It's a barebones athlon based PC overclocked to 1Ghz, and it comes with a 1 year warranty.
I'd rather have someone else to blame if I happened to fry my machine.
Mike
Athlon Overclocking (Score:1)
I finally got 5 of those connectors after about 2 months of trying to find them. No one really sells them in non-bulk supply. Now I'm just waiting on my resistor packs and diodes. So far I've spent maybe 20$ on the whole thing and that's all I'm going to have to spend. If you know how to make one you can save a lot of money!
Btw, if anyone wants to buy 1 or 2 of the actual 40-pin connectors email me at jpal@linuxfan.com. They're a bitch to find, and I'm willing to sell 1 or 2 of them if someone else wants to build their own.
-John
EDUCATE YOURSELF, BOY! YOU STUPID? (Score:2)
Re:The source of the overclocking fad. (Score:1)
Re:Concurrency matching (Score:1)
In contrast, the concurrency of "good" SMPs, like the convex exemplar or origin 2k is huge. For example, the exemplar has (can't remember exactly) like 8 banks or 32-way interleaved memory, attached to processors over a crossbar!
And all this concurrency for a measily 16 processors
Hell yes! (Score:1)
So you've got a CPU that's almost as good as a 600$ CPU for less than 200$. Hell, get two of them, if you want an SMP setup so badly.
Re:Kind of pricey (Score:1)
Re:Why Overclock? (Score:1)
Re:Crippling the L2 for the sake of the core? (Score:2)
Some other points:
1. This is not the first overclocking device of this type. There are a couple of others, the most prominent being one from Trinity Micro.
2. There is also a 2/5 cache divider option, which allows you to get to higher megahertz without going all the way to 1/3. Also, there is a way to set the divider in software, so you don't have to solder to change the divider. I think that is why AMD didn't give access to the cache divider on the "golden fingers" connector on the top of the processor. The program to do this is still not posted in a public spot on the net, as far as I know. "Soon"
3. The L2 cache is sometimes more than a little bit of a limitation. Let's suppose your processor only does 600 mhz at 1/2, but it does 900 mhz at 1/3. That's a 50% increase in megahertz, both ending with a 300 mhz cache, so in this case you would DEFINITELY be faster.
4. Athlons should soon have onboard cache, at full speed, so you won't need to do this. There is supposed to be a version of this with up to 2 megabytes of cache, called the Mustang, or "Athlon Ultra". This chip should kick some serious ass.
SMP with AThalons (Score:1)
I am considering getting a SMP box running and right now I have 2(370 Overclocked Celerons) in mind maybe I should change this to Athlons.
Come lets here you suggestions for the best non Intel SMP machine....
Re:Crippling the L2 for the sake of the core? (Score:1)
Re:Crippling the L2 for the sake of the core? (Score:1)
Re:Kind of pricey (Score:2)
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
Really (Score:2)
When I buy a PIII, I'm not paying intel for the right to use it at a certain frequency, I'm paying intel for a chip that *they* have guaranteed will run up to a certain speed. Over that speed, and you are on your own.
Now.. when the Celeron 300A was out, and you could easily clock it to 150%, heck, that's fantastic. A real money saver... spend $30 on extra gear to cool it, and you were set.
Now.... do I spend $75 on extra fans/heat sinks, when I could buy a chip that's rated at a a similar higher speed for about the same added cost? Sure.. it might cost me a few dollars more.. but then I *know* it will work too.
Like.. Kryotech.. now, those Cool athlon 1Ghz jobs have major geek cool factor, I'll admit, and I'd love to have one.. but realistically, I could be 2 other full machines for the price of just their base model, each machine being around 600Mhz anyway.... so why would I bother? What good would it do?
Not Quite Cool Enough (Score:2)
Re:Overclock Wars? (Score:3)
-jwb
Re:Crippling the L2 for the sake of the core? (Score:3)
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The point was... (Score:2)
The reason they would make it hard for people to overclock is that they would rather sell you the more expensive chip. Courtesy to customers is in damn short supply, which is why low profit margin cars are built to disintegrate in time for the new model to come out ($6000 construction cost for a $10000 car that lasts 5 years, or $10000 construction cost for a $50000 car that lasts 50 years: looked at as individual jobs, the latter is much more profitable, but to a long-term industry, they are close to equal; fairness doesn't even come into it). In theory, competition is supposed to wipe out these tactics, but industries always have these little understandings that member companies will follow even to their own demise, like a daimyo refusing to arm his troops with modern guns and change the face of Japanese feudal society even when he'll be defeated otherwise.
2nd try (way to go "preview mode"!): (Score:1)
Here's the article
-A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Oh, fuck it... (Score:1)
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
What are you on? (Score:1)
how can you compare an overclocked chips price to a non-over clocked, but overclockable chip?
that makes no sense
especially since clock speed is not really a great measure of anything other than clock speed....
it used to say how many instructions per time period, but it doesn't do that anymore w/ all the different execution units....
not that overclocking is a bad thing but clock speed fixation is
Re:Cost-effective? (Score:1)
Gas pedal for PC? (Score:2)
Re:Cool (Score:1)
Of course...I think he was trying to overclock a 500Mhz version or something...might have changed since then.
Re:Any resources for totally lazy OC-wannabe bums? (Score:1)
Re:Crippling the L2 for the sake of the core? (Score:1)
Why NOT Overclock? (Score:1)
Its a driving force in us all...
Re:The source of the overclocking fad. (Score:1)
if you buy a system that is specificially overclocked its cool
but if you buy a pIII 600 system, and its running a pIII 500 chip, w/ no extra cooling, in a piece of crap case it has a higherpossibility of overheating and then who do you blame?
intel, cause their chip overheated
then you go get an amd chip, and intel has lost market share
[shameless plug] Re:SMP not what it's cracked up (Score:2)
kool (Score:1)
=======
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Re:I'm all for overclocking, but... (Score:1)
And if you combined the AfterBurner...with the Kryotech system, well, let's just say I wish I had a few grand lying around.
Re:Wow - I was JUST reading this today! (Score:2)
Exchange rate: 0.691300
Rate valid as of: 1/10/2000
Re:Except this (Score:1)
What about,,, (Score:2)
Take for example: with a clock multiplier of 6 on a 100 Mhz FSB (600Mhz chip), upping the FSB to 133 MHz boosts the CPU to 798Mhz (198Mhz gain). Compare with a 400Mhz chip (multiplier of 4 on a 100Mhz FSB), upping the FSB to 133 will boost the CPU to 532MHz (132MHz gain). In both cases the CPU speed has gone up be a factor of 1/3. But perhaps CPU's are not effected so much by the factor, but the shear amount.
I'm no hardware guy: I don't know the effects of increases MHz and heat on these increasingly smaller dies. Maybe somebody would like to dicuss this (and probably point out the error of my ways.)
Re:Motherboards an issue? (Score:1)
If you want to get critical, think of the FIC SD11, possibly the worst mainboard ever created. Did you know FIC's engineers dropped the ball on this one? The board is a preproduction sample. They had to rush their product to market so better boards won't hog all of the sales.
Re:Why Overclock? (Score:2)
Incidentally, I've just ordered the parts for a dual P3 system (I got carried away when I came across a good deal whilst looking around at Slockets). Hopefully I won't be sitting around waiting for Visual C++ under NT for so long in the future. As I work from home, I can't afford take risks with my computer crashing due a minor instabilty caused by overclocking. I almost bought that dual Celeron hack the Abit-BP6, but I don't think that it is stable enough for me to risk not being payed for time spent recovering from a crash.
Re:First Post (Score:1)
As per usual, I'll do it myself.
Re:Cost-effective? Depends (Score:2)
Re:SMP not what it's cracked up to be.. (Score:2)
It depends what the app does really. A word processor doesn't benefit greatly from SMP (the CPU spends most of the time idle as the app is waiting for user input). MS Word is multithreaded in some areas though, for example, background printing. In this case, the multithreaded makes it Word feel more responsive, but as a side effect utilises SMP if available. As I understand it, an SMP OS like NT will automatically take advantage of extra CPUs when threads are in use. Just looking at my task manager, I see that the majority of processes have more than one thread (and thus could benefit in some way from an extra CPU), for example: Internet Explorer - 11 threads; McAffee Virus Sheild - 11 threads; the system - 31; SQL Server - 17; Yahoo! Messenger - 14; etc.
I would think that SMP gives a real boost when two processes (or threads) pipe data from one to the other and work in parallel. Reduced context switches, and true parallelism rather than imitated parallelism (which takes twice as long).
My point is: people already multithread their apps, so they will use SMP. Whether you see a benefit is another story - that depends on what you're doing.
The other thing of course: it's much easier to quickly develop a single-threaded application. Companies are constantly rushing. On top of this, in my experience, a large proportion of the software developers can't handle concurrency. The amount of obvious multithreading bugs that I've had to fix is staggering. When a company realises that they could develop a not so nice and inferior piece of software in less time, they generally do so (unfortunately).
Re:Not Quite Cool Enough (Score:1)
--
Re:Cost-effective? (Score:1)
Not a 2x performance increase but it does make a difference.
Re:Cost-effective? Depends (Score:2)
Re:The point was... (Score:2)
Easy, look how fast that one Celeron chip that was superoverclockable (and it was only one model boys and girls, your cousin never overclocked his 450 Celery to 900) sold out! Feed the overclockers a MASS of your 500MHz chips that can go to 700, make a huge profit in bulk there. Sell the overpriced 700MHz chips to power users in business and home that want power but don't really feel like cracking the case open on their chip... let alone simply opening the case which scares most people.
E.
I think this is probably the smartest thing AMD could ever do, even better than beating Intels chips in every single conceivable benchmark by a significant margin especially in the holy floating point arena...
Re:SMP not what it's cracked up to be.. (Score:1)
With SMP, the X server gets a CPU, as does the app. Much less context switching, and the cache doesn't get thrashed because the linux scheduler tries to keep processes on the CPU they last ran on.
The old X FAQ actually recommends swaping workstation and $DISPLAY with a coworker on a fast network, to reduce the context switching overhead. You work on her machine, showing up on your local X server, and he does the same.
SMP is the wave of the future. Between the dual celeron board, and $110 P-II 450s, SMP is the way to go for the fastest system available cheap.
As in... ? (Score:2)
Coarse grained being (sorry, C++ not C):
someObj::someFunc()
{
myMutex.lock();
mySharedObj->doSomeSomthing();
myMutex.unlock();
}
Whereas fine-grained would be:
someObj::someFunc()
{
myMutex.lock();
mySharedObj->doSomeSomthing();
myMutex.unlock();
}
Re:Start at a lower frequency (Score:1)
Sorry for being dense but. why start with a slower chip?
Re:Motherboards an issue? (Score:1)
Re:Start at a lower frequency (Score:2)
Athlon 700 ~$500
Athlon 550 ~$200
if they both can get to 650MHz (since they may be from the same fab lot (taking all sorts of things into account), you feel smarter and not so poor...
Re:SMP not what it's cracked up to be.. (Score:1)
Jeremy
Re:Cost-effective? (Score:2)
Type r_smp 1 at the console, and restart the game, and you've enabled q3's smp support..
Also important to note is that 3dfx cards do not support q3 in SMP mode.
Jeremy
Overclocking, a Silicon Valley perspective (Score:4)
As the fab for a given process became more mature, the defect level usually decreased. So at the beginning of a product cycle, you got more of the slow parts and fewer of the fast ones, and over time, more parts were produced with the higher speed ratings. Over time, then, the price of the high-speed parts declined.
Then Intel reinvented itself as a consumer products company, and started pricing ICs the way GM prices cars. In the auto world, a luxury car costs maybe 30% more to build than an economy car, but sells for perhaps 3x as much. Intel started doing this for processors, with advertising-promoted brands at different points in the speed spectrum. The interaction between this policy and the way fabs actually work resulted in some deliberately undermarked chips, and the rebirth of "overclocking" as a semi-respectable enterprise.
Then some distributors started shipping systems with overclocked CPUs. Some even printed fake part numbers on the chip package. This led to trouble. Intel may have lost some revenue, but worse, they were getting a reputation as an unreliable IC supplier. So they added holograms on chips, part ID info readable from software, and speed-checking (which is hard; CPU chips ordinarly lack an on-chip timebase.)
Today, IC fab yields are so good that the part-selection approach is rare. If parts are failing, the fab has a problem. CPU speed and model has become mostly a market positioning thing.
In the industrial computer world, underclocking is common; the temperature margins improve, and so does reliability.
At this point, Intel and AMD are competing so hard on speed and price that neither can afford to undermark. So overclocking is a marginal idea at best. Gamers are probably better off getting a new graphics board.
Re:As in... ? (Score:1)
Jeremy
right! (Score:1)
New PIII's (Score:1)
Jeremy Allen
jallen@idminc.com
Re:Afterburner (Score:1)
Check out Kyrotech: http://www.kryotech.com/
Re:Motherboards an issue? (Score:1)
Re:The source of the overclocking fad. (Score:1)
- Mike Roberto
-- roberto@apk.net
--- AOL IM: MicroBerto
Re:SMP not what it's cracked up to be.. (Score:3)
The big problem with Linux SMP, IMNSHO: NO CPU affinity. Which means roughly this: processes are rotated thru all available CPUs, instead of being assigned to one CPU and then being dynamically balanced (new jobs sent to the lightest-used CPU, when CPUs are imbalanced by some threshold %, move 1-2 smaller jobs that will balance them out).
What does this mean? well, CPU cache is practically useless. Makes all that dough spent on Xeons instead of Celerons seem wasted --and it is.
Don't get me wrong; I am all for Linux, and I am sure SMP will catch up pretty soon. But don't go spending $$$ on SMP machines expecting (n-1)*100% increase in performance.
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
Re:The source of the overclocking fad. (Score:1)
Re:Overclocking, a Silicon Valley perspective (Score:2)
Re:SMP not what it's cracked up to be.. (Score:1)
How about some of us set about crafting a neural or fuzzy scheduler? Neural nets have have an incredible way of optimising to a problem. Speed might be difficult at first, but a simple checksum or crc pattern stream might provide enough clue to a neural net to allow it to balance loads in a meaningful way. Cached past patterns could be used for future prognostications...
I can guarantee you one thing: someone will try this strategy, at some point. Might as well be us!
Re:SMP not what it's cracked up to be.. (Score:1)
Also, From my last look at the scheduler, there is a big preference given to the previous processor a process was run on, so as to not incur a TLB flush.
But on an overloaded box, TLB flushes are a huge overhead. But we are talking about where the # of running process == # of avail CPUs. So I don't see the "processes rotated thru all available cpus" that you claim.
Couple of comments... (Score:1)
First of all, why is this particular product being highlighted? I've seen at least 8 other companies making these. Not to mention that making your own is a simple matter for a first-year EE student.
Second, why do I see so much pooh-poohing of overclocking in this discussion? I think one of my happiest hardware moments was when I got my K6-2 380 to run stably at 500Mhz. Believe me there *was* a performance difference, and I don't really play 3D games. Now that I just got my Athlon 650, I'm assembling the parts to make my own "goldenfingers." I see many accounts of 650's doing 750 and 800 without a problem, and without modifying the cache divisor.
Speaking of the Athlon, damn. I'm very impressed with this chip. I have never been this close to the "bleeding edge" before, and it's a neat feeling. It takes less then 6 minutes to do a complete kernel build (dep, clean, bzImage, modules, etc.), 3 SETI@Home packets a day, and I can turn on almost all the bells and whistles in E with no problems.
If you dont want to overclock, don't. I wouldn't do it on a mission-critical machine, but it's a thrilling feeling the first time you boot up faster then before.
If you want to see some crazy-assed OCing, check this out:
http://totl.net/Eunuch/Eunuch2.html [totl.net]
Now *thats* serious
Re:Cost-effective? (Score:1)
My take on this... (Score:1)
Re:Where in the WORLD did you get those prices?? (Score:2)
Athlon 700 MHz - 496 at tufshop.com
497 at econopc.com...
4 listed ~500
2 listed ~529
more 583+
Re:New PIII's (Score:2)
The other I drilled a hole in the corner and is on my keychain.
It also holds up for multiple users (Score:2)
Re:Overclocking, a Silicon Valley perspective (Score:2)
Re:SMP not what it's cracked up to be.. (Score:2)
The optimal performance increase with 2 CPU SMP is about 45%.
Linux is below 20%, Solaris is close to 40%.
Huh? Why 45%? Is this Quake performance or some kind of general claim? It sounds awfully low.
I have made many CPU intensive tasks on a 4 CPU Solaris machine that I have shared with others (also doing intensive computations) and have not noticed anything like this. I have not made any timings, but each CPU is faster than what I have on my desk and it certainly looks like a linear speedup until the machine runs out of processes.
Lars
__