:: theMediaman journal ::
Daily events, observations on the hypocrisy of modern capitalism, observations of the multimedia world and other existentialist things.| [::..archive..::] |
|---|
| [::..waste of time..::] |
| :: Stair Diving [>] |
| :: no-effort movies [>] |
| :: Build a dream rig [>] |
:: Friday, August 17, 2001 ::
Sorry... another geek posting. I'll try to keep my techie journal entries down to just one at a time.
Last night I was so annoyed at how unrealistic it is for me to spend $3500 on a new computer system, that I decided to see if I can overclock my current PC.
For the uninitiated, your processor speed is a function of how fast your motherboard goes (eg. 66 MHz) and a clock multiplier (eg. 2.5x). In my case, my PC goes 166 MHz. My chip never crashes. If it overheats from overclocking it, the it will either crash, give wierd errors or be outright destroyed.
First was to find out how to change the settings. The documentation on the ASUS website was helpful, but not fantastic. My motherboard is an older version of the one they have information for - so I had to figure a lot of stuff out by trial and error.... and crashes.
The first thing to try is being overly ambitious. I tried to overclock my processor to 200 MHZ (66 MHz x 3.0). It could not even make it all the way through the boot process. It would usually die after detecting the Plug N Play cards in my system and before detecting the hard drives.
Next was to test a slower motherboard speed. I bottomed out the bus speed to 50 MHz and brought the multiplier back down to 2.5x. The result was a system running at 125 MHz and was really, really stable - but slower. Same effect when I ran it at 50MHz x 3.0. It was very stable and was actually almost as fast as the (66x2.5) 166 MHz.
Set the computer at the slowest setting of 50 MHz x 1.5 = 75 MHz..... the computer took nearly five minutes to boot. Useless.
Now I know that a slower motherboard helps stability, I set it to 60 MHz, and ran the multiplier up to 3.0 (the maximum the board supports) to get 180 MHz - a 10% speed increase at the expence of a 10% decrease for the motherboard). There was no noticable boost in speed, but when I ran 3Dmark99 (a program that tests how well your computer can run 3D games) the raw processing power saw a boost of about 1%, but the rest of the system took a hit of about 2-10% depending on the test. Sort of like swapping your mind for Stephen Hawking's, but in exchange you have to swap bodies with Stephen Hawking.
Looks like it's back to Dell.ca for me.
:: Stephen 1:06 PM [+] ::
...
