The (slightly extreme) dangers of overclocking... (1 Viewer)

[Glenn Overholt]

KEE-RIST! Will you quit nitpicking? Ok, so you found one! A newly created exception to the rule.

During the last decade, the hardware and the software raced against each other, and that was why overclocking came to be. Even if you did get the absolute-fastest system on the planet in 6 months you'd be screaming that the new game you got is slower than a snail now.

Now things have seemed to have leveled off. The race is over, and I guess the hardware won, but who cares?

Glenn

 

[Ian Wilson]

Overclocking came about because the opportunity arose to do so. Nothing to do with whether an application needed it or not. And that follows to this day.

1.5 GHz/or its AMD equivalent - fine if you're happy running Word and surfing the net. But it doesn't cut it in the real world of video encoding, gaming, etc

 

[Max Leung]

Hey Glenn...I found more than one. I'm nitpicking on you because you're an easy target.

Gaming is huge right now...they make more money than movies. I hear a lot of complaints from people (mostly men in their late 20's with disposable income - well, until they blew it on their slow-ass PC) about how slow their computers are.

As long as there are computer games that push the envelope - which is quite a lot of them - we will see more hardware improvements. Heck, aren't quite a few of the new Microsoft Media Center PCs running at 3 GHz now? Holy crap.

Remember - as long as applications are written badly, hardware will never overtake software.

 

[Francois Caron]

If anyone's wondering, the system has been completely rebuilt on a bigger hard drive. The larger hard drive is actually for my data files, not for the OS! The Windows partiton is still set to 39 GB and has 29 GB of available space. The data partition is now set to 150 GB with only 67 GB of available space!

The old drive's partitions were damaged more severely than I thought. As soon as PartitionMagic saw it, it wouldn't even touch it! The partition table was partially corrupt. No problem. Once I transferred the contents on the new drive, I wiped out the old drive and turned it into an external backup drive for my data. The previous backup drive was then turned into a backup drive for only the OS.

Peace and tranquility has finally returned to my system. Now I can start trying to overclock it again! JUST KIDDING!!!

 

[Joshua Clinard]

I happen to agree with Eric to a cetain extent. People have been doing video editing for years. They have been doing it at my school for more than 3 years, with Adobe Premier and Windows XP well before 2.0 Ghz chips even became available. It may be a little bit faster if you are using a faster chip, but it still works just fine. And people have also been playing video games for years. My brother can run Half-Life and Doom 3 on his celeron system. The gameplay may be a little smoother on a faster system, but that is not the point. The point is a higher speed is not essential for gameplay or for video editing. It's good, yes, but not essential.

 

[Mike Fassler]

its essential if you wanna play games at resolutions over 800x600. BTW a celery systerm would be lucky to run doom3
over 640x480, just being able to play the game isnt the point.

 

[Joshua Clinard]

Your dead wrong. His resolution is set at 1280 x 1024. It runs fine on the Celeron. It's only slightly choppy he says. I couldn't really tell. It looked awesome to me. Processor speed is only part of the equation. He has 768 MB ram + ATI Radeon 9200 w/128 MB video ram. Not everyone requires flawless video performance. I think this is a little like edge enhancement. Not everyone can see it.

 

[Max Leung]

Doom3 at 1280x1024? On a celery? Must be a heck of a slideshow!

 

[Mike Fassler]

somehow I doubt he's playing it very well at that resolution, but I guess you never know, I play at 1024x768 on ultra settings with my system. and its pretty flawless. but damn I just gotta see his laggy ass screenies. what his average FPS?

 

[Scott L]

Stop yanking our chain.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2146&p=5

Here is 640x480 with low quality settings. The 9200 is spitting out 20 frames per second. And even better the processor is an FX-53 overclocked to 2.6Ghz.

Don't know what you're smoking...

 

[Joshua Clinard]

You are being very closed minded. I would be willing to bet that no amount of proof would convince you, so I guess I have to give up. I still know that I'm right. He's running Doom3 and Half-Life 2 at 1024x768, full screen, with low settings, and it looks good to both of us. It's not perfect, but it is certainly acceptable. If you don't belive me, too bad. I'll get my AMD Athlon XP 2700 and be very happy!

 

[Mike Fassler]

ahaha so now its 1024x768! quit changin yer story bro. btw HL2
isnt released yet so it would be kinda hard to be playing, and the warez versions that are around the net arent even the full game.

 

[Diallo B]

dah dunt, dah dunt....

i tend to agree that folks don't need a super system to play games. but...

your credibility is shot now. lol.

 

[Joshua Clinard]

My, you sure do get worked up over a video game. Just because you have one experience, doesn't mean that someone else may not have a totally different experience. Be a little open minded. At least I am able to admit when I make a mistake. I just happened to get the name of the game mixed up. I hardly ever play computer games myself, so I didn't remember the correct title. I just remembered it was a recent game, and that it was the 2nd one in a series . But since you told me Half Life 2 isn't out yet, I went and called my brother, and I found out it was Unreal Tournament 2 that he was playing the other day. But I did get the second one right, and that is Doom 3, which is even more taxing than Unreal Tournament. But that's not the point. The point is that he can play several recent games, and they all run pretty good. Doesn't matter which ones. But I should add he also plays Star Wars Battlefront. My credibility is shot because of a typo? Give me a break.

 

[Max Leung]

Unreal Tournament 2004 plays wonderfully on many older systems. It's actually the 3rd in the series. Unreal Tournament (aka UT99), Unreal Tournament 2003, and now there is Unreal Tournament 2004 (there is no Unreal Tournament 2 - but there is a game called Unreal 2 - which uses the old UT2003 engine). The game engine is the same as UT2003, and when that game came out the top-end PCs were barely at 2 GHz (1.5GHz?). The top-end videocard at the time was the Geforce Ti4600 I think. UT2004 - runs acceptably well on 1.5 GHz PCs.

UT2004 can be played at well over 60 frames per second at 1600x1200 on today's top-end videocards.

(I'm not sure how you can mistype Unreal Tournament though. I'd call it an innocent brain-fart! )

Halo - now that game brings almost all PCs to their knees. It's scary. *shudder*

Interestingly enough, Grand Theft Auto doesn't run that great on < 1.5 GHz machines...the developers didn't optimize very well.

 

[Joshua Clinard]

Well my brother called it Unreal Tournament 2. I'm not sure if it's 2003, or 2004. And the typo I was referring to was when I put 1280x1068 when I meant 1024x768. I knew he used the one of the acceptable modes for a 17 inch monitor, but I forgot which one he used. This is just a case where I forgot to double check my facts before posting. I'm sorry. It won't happen again. Anyway, my points been made. I'm sure his system would crash if he tried to run Halo. It's supposed to be really taxing from what I hear. Which is not much, as you can tell. I do know there were 700 people that reserved their copy in little old Abilene.