[plug] Overclocking a CPU

[Daniel Foote]

> quick short vote anyone overclocking ANY of their computers?
> only YES votes need to reply.

I don't bother overclocking my machines anymore. Not really worth the
effort. And they tend to get a little bit unstable when you do it,
especially with the newer chips. (Not that I've done this with any of
my machines in the last two years, but I've seen several other do so
and then cause instability).

In the past I overclocked a K6-2 chip from 450MHz to 500MHz... had to
up the voltage a shade to make it work, but I had that running for
over 12 months with no issues. So it's possible to do, highly
dependent on the chip... that jump did make quite a difference to the
machine.

My previous desktop machine (semi-retired a few weeks ago) actually is
underclocked. It's got an Athlon XP 2000+, but the motherboard is too
old (5 year old AOpen motherboard - one of the best I have) and can't
generate the real clock speed for it. It's supposed to be running at
1.6GHz, instead the motherboard runs it at 1.3GHz. But you have to
look at it another way:
- The chip runs really cool.
- The machine runs Linux 99% of the time now (opposed to 70+% when not
retired), and is plenty grunty enough (thanks to Debian Linux + XFCE)
- Before its retirement, the CPU speed was not the limit in gaming; it
was the graphics card and RAM (256MB, 5 year old original 100MHz SD
RAM).

Ok, I'll stop rambling now.

Daniel.