kuyu said:
I work with a guy that's totally OBSESSED with Intel. He's a nice guy, but he believes that overclocking everything is the wave of the future. Yesterday he tells me "Someone has overclocked a pentium EE and some corsair ram to over a 1GHz FSB. The processor got up to 4.44GHz. At 4.45, it cracked the core in half!".
Give me break. The pc world has a faster computer than the G5, but it costs >$1200 for just the processor and memory. I doubt Intel's warranty covers overclocking.
I told him that the new PMac's would have dual/independant 1.5GHz FSB's, and that the new PowerPC 970's will run ~36% faster than the FX-53 (which is barely faster than an overclocked Pentium EE).
Some people just don't get it. Intel's a dying breed. Ask Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Toshiba, etc. They're technologically inferior... unless you overclock one.
Overclocking a chip doesn't change the architecture of the chip, in some regards it does make the machine overall faster, but that's not really the full reason people do it. Infact, I personally feel that the ~x86 architecture is still fairly good, but the new 64 bit processors are even better.
To elaborate better on the overclocker statement, I will explain my point of view. I, am an overclocker (I feel like i'm in AA). I literally overclocked every piece of hardware that I got my fingers on, including processors, video cards, motherboard (FSB, linked to processors), etc. I also heavily tweak anything I use, including memory usage in Windows, and swap/HD configurations/net configurations in Linux. Why do I do this? I got a dual AMD MP 2400, I don't need to do this for speed. The reason why, my friend, if because there are two groups of people who do this. The first group, are people like me, who try to make their computers work the absolute fastest, and most stable as humanly possible. It's common knowledge that Intels, and AMDs are underclocked of what they actually can handle, overclocking gets it closer to what it should have come from the factory. The 2nd group, is the group who goes around trying to see who has the biggest and best computer.
I'm guilty of both parts, but fall under the first category, as I literally tweak everything as much as possible to do this. This isn't an ~x86 only thing, if I got a mac desktop (I ordered a laptop, and I don't overclock laptops due to heat issues), I would overclock it..simply said. I go through painstaking efforts to optimize my computer to the max it can be. I even go so far into this, that I use gentoo, heavily set for my exact chipset...it's all to squeeze the last bit of juice this box can produce, and get it running perfectly.
You may feel that your mac is great the way it is, without overclocking - most people would agree with you that any stock computer is fine the way it is, but then there are people like me...people who will test anything, and everything, to find out what is possible and to pick the best comination.
I hope that helps most of the people understand another point of view on this. Overclockers, like many gamers and exploit finders, have a pretty bad image with the general computer user community. Simply said, we aren't all that bad - we just enjoy messing with stuff until it works perfectly.
Oh one last thing, I'm getting my powerbook soon, and trust me...I will be digging through every single thing I can change, including command line FreeBSD configuration files to optimize the computer. I won't overclock it just due to the simple fact that heat is a big issue I rather not deal with on a laptop - but it will be tweaked to run the best it can run.
who the hell cares?
