Hello
  This is certainly a huge subject and one off-topic enough I suppose to
keep my responses shorter than a Dostoevsky novel so please forgive my huge
snips, top-post and short (realtively) reply but I'll try to make it
somewhat worthwhile.

  While it is true that the emphasis has drifted off CPU overclocking as
per my other response which outlines some of how manufacturer's have seen
the demand and filled it by offerring a wider range of processors such as
Intel's Extreme and AMD's Athlon64 FX series (not to mention that this
years Celeron/Duron or equivalent is often not much less than last years
Pentium/Athlon) and better cooling etc., this does not mean CPU
overclocking has stopped.  In fact it is even being done by cutting edge
system builders like Alienware and even on notebooks, as well as commonly
available from some mobo manufacturers.  The biggest factor against
experimentation right now I contend is that presently the CPU is not a
bottleneck and for some time now wastes considerable cycles waiting on ram
and harddrives.

  That said, only this year did I finally retire (actually sold for a fair
price to someone who is very happy) an Asus P3B-F which employs the now
ancient, yet venerable, 440BX chipset.  Because of hot-rodding it runs at
1.7GHz CPU (a Celeron with 256K cache - essentially a P3) has UDMA 5 due to
a Promise accelerator card, USB 2.0 due to pci card.  Although it maxed out
at 512MB ram that ram (and all the peripheral cards - video, ide, etc.) due
to their quality, runs at a significant overclock since the pci bus is
running at 41MHz not 33MHz.  Just for example benchmarking hard drives
revealed burst reads in excess of 85MB/s.  That's almost a 2 generation
leap and obviously extended it's usefullness way beyond what would have
been possible w/o it.

  My newest system, based on an MSi K8N-Neo2 Platinum+ mobo, comes with
overclocking built right into the bios and even has a GUI that can change
rates from the windows (there are analogs available for OS/2 and Linux for
some hardware) although from bios is best.  Asus, Abit, MSI, Gigabyte, in
fact most mobos available to amateur builders, all now include incremental
notching for voltage, frequency and dividers.   Maximum PC magazine
routinely overclocks virtually every CPU/System they get to report at the
very least it's headroom and qualifies support hardware as to it's effect
on overclocking.  There are machines fairly commonly running up to 5 GHz
now and obviously nobody is advertising a 5GHz CPU so this is evidence that
overclocking is alive and well.  However it is true that the majority of
emphasis has shifted to videocards and that is likely caused by the
performance and cost of SLI systems and $600 plus desktop videocards. 
Speed for cheap is what hot-rodding/overclocking is a

ll about or at least that's it's source.  Then it tends to become
mainstream and the game moves up a notch or 3.

  BTW it is still possible to get considerable gain with spending little or
no money.  If one takes a stock CPU/hs/fan combo and removes the
inefficient but convenient double-sided "thermal" tape and laps
(flatten and polish) the HS and CPU heat spreader, gains of up to 10
degrees C are possible with existing fan.  This creates considerable
headroom for clocking up at almost no cost beyond an afternoon's time and a
little sandpaper and a dollop of quality thermal compound - maybe 5 bucks
total parts cost.

Jimmy
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Derek W. Keoughan" 
> On Tue, 07 Mar 2006 11:41:00 -0500, inkleput{at}isp.com wrote:
> 
> >"Derek W. Keoughan"  said:
> >
> >>>Hi all,
> >>>OK, what's next in quiet-n-cool computing? Anyone wanna try this?
> >
> >>Let me know how you make out... I'd be too tempted to overclock the
> >>whole rig and make french fries... :-D
> >
> >>-Derek
> >
> >I'm curious.  Percentage wise, about how much increase can you get out
> >of the "average" push?  I ask because I'm a bit
skeptical whether it's
> >worth the effort.
> 
> Well, it's been a number of years since I actually bothered to
> overclock anything - because of
> 
> 1) the risk of cooking something (other than french fries!),
> 
> 2) the time involved in checking it out,
> 
> 3) the minimal performance gains,
> 
> 4) the lockups and "weird stuff" and lost time you wind up with if
> you've pushed it too far,
> 
> 5) the clock multipliers being locked-down on my CPUs of choice -
> anything by AMD in the last several years, and probably most
> importantly...
> 
> 6) the "I'm not in college anymore, and can afford more speed and if
> the faster chip doesn't work I can blame someone else and make them fix
> it" factor. :)
> 
> That said, I have a Celeron 500 that's been quite happily running OS/2
> Warp 4 and later eCS since about mid-1999, at an overclocked 562MHz,
> 24/7/365...  I've blown a pair of SCSI drives in that box, and it's now
> running on an older 40GB IDE... but it's quite happy collecting dust,
> being rebooted every six months when I shut down and rearrange
> everything.  It's on a UPS, and ran for well over 90 minutes last week
> while the house hydro panel was being swapped out before the APC
> PowerChute for OS/2 shut it down...
> 
> For the rest of them, well, there's an AMD dual-core Athlon64 4800+, a
> dual-socket dual-core Opteron 270 (4 CPUs) with liquid cooling that
> everyone saw at Warpstock 2005, a Pentium-III 600 (test rig for hard
> drives), an Athlon 1333, an AMD Sempron 2400+ (my wife's), and this box
> - an Athlon64 3500+...   but they're all running at rated speeds with
> no overclocking.
> 
> 
> Sites like www.tomshardware.com have featured numerous articles on
> this... but a quick search of "overclock" yields only results on
> graphics cards... and the majority of articles on CPUs are dated 2000,
> 2001, 2002, or 2003...   my educated guess is, the technology is not
> easily overclocked anymore, or the returns on invested time just aren't
> worth writing home about.
> 
> Here's one with some comparisons with recent CPU's that's worth a read:
> 
> http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1758
> 
> 
> Mind you - the price of the parts required to "make it happen" and the
> expertise... well... probably easier to buy the next highest CPU
> available, and just run it. :-D
> 
> 
> -Derek
> 
> Derek W. Keoughan,
> Finnegan Software, Inc.,  Brampton, Ontario, Canada  http://www.finnsoft.com
> 416-410-4774 phone - 800-258-0033 toll free - 905-846-5516 fax
> 
> Consulting, Networking, Cabling, Internet, Hardware, Software, Tech Support
> eComStation, OS/2 Warp/Server, WinXP/2000/NT/Me/9x, Linux
> Customized PURRformance PC's & Servers, OnSite Services, Installations and 
> Upgrades
> 
> = Celebrating 11 years of "happily purring" computing -
Founded 1995-02-02 =
> 
> FinnSoft "CyberCat" logo clothing and more -
http://www.cafepress.com/finnsoft
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> Yahoo! Groups Links
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 




 
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