[BLOG] The good old days of overclocking
I'm in the middle of packing to move again, like I seem to like to do every year or so. I still have a couple of extra rigs laying around, but haven't done anything with them since I started school again two years ago.
I dragged up a heavy mid-tower that contains some of the former parts of my main rig, which have spent most of their time being neglected ever since I moved to the K8 platform. It has my Abit NF7-S, which I once coveted for its overclocking ability and sweet Soundstorm audio. A mobile Barton Athlon XP, built for lower voltage than what would be thrown at it once I started experimenting with water cooling. The rest, hand-me-down hard drives, some PC-2700 RAM that I don't know how I came across, and a laughable GeForce FX 5200 that Buddy J gave me once, so that I could experience Nvidia's lost generation.
The most ridiculous part has to be the cooler that I've got strapped onto the Barton, though. It represents the pinnacle of 2002's air cooling technology. What I have on here is perhaps the worst, loudest, copper heat pipe cooler ever made.
I don't know the brand, but in 2002, 60mm screaming HSFs were still common. It was this cooler that made me doubt that heat pipes would ever work. But, it was the only spare cooler in my parts box, so now, in my dining room, it screams its vengeance for being sentenced to dank basement solitude for so many years.
My dining room is where the beast is set up. While the case, a Noblesse that I had lusted over for perhaps two years before I bought, is somewhat attractive, the mismatched peripherals span generations and barriers of good taste. A 17" CRT with some burn-in that CB gave me two LANs ago, some old Dell-issue harman/kardon speakers from an ex-girlfriend, a Sun 3-button USB ball mouse (that CrazyJoe rocked in this year's Epic TF2 tournament), and a keyboard from a PowerMac G4. A terrible, terrible keyboard that offers none of the right kind of feedback.
And yet, the rig that I set up here, just to see if there was anything I needed to get off the hard drive, fixes my attention. You see, it tricked me. The default multipliers of mobile Bartons aren't recognized on desktop boards, so I clearly had to go into the BIOS to speed it up from the 500 Mhz the board decided to run it at. But I couldn't remember the stock speed, exactly. I set it to 1333, figuring that's safe. Hours later, I realize that Folding had resumed - it was still set to run as a service. I hadn't yet gotten the wireless connection working, so the WU it was crunching on is practically vintage. At least retro.
I killed the service, and chide Folding@Home for risking untold ills by lighting a fire under a processor with only old, crusty thermal paste and the aforementioned suckass HSF to dissipate the heat. I then fix the wireless adapter, only to download drivers to get the finicky old GeForce FX to work, you understand. I had never seen 4-bit color in Windows XP before, and I had seen enough.
While restarting, I realize that it's only running at 133 Mhz FSB. Well, that's a waste of RAM. I kick it up to 166 to match the PC 2700. It is at this point that I realized I was already in a downward spiral, and yet decided to restart Folding anyway. I thought I was curious how fast it would fold. "Really damn slow," anyone could have told me. But I needed to quantify.
Over an hour and a half to complete one percent at 1666 Mhz. Had I been fully possessed of my wits, that figure would have convinced me of the futility, or perhaps I would have at least paused to hear the laughter from those of you running GPU2 clients out there. Instead, the pathetic showing made me want to earn a smidgen more respect for the rig. I went back to the BIOS. 2 Ghz is a good place to start tweaking in earnest.
Perhaps this is a good time in this tale of love and circuits to pause, spare you further details, and get to the good part.
An old Socket A rig sits in my dining room, a patchwork of hand-me-down parts. That heatsink I hate? I remembered it came to me as Icrontic_11's first cooler, new in box, back in 2002. One of you Icrontians donated that to the cause, and loud or not, Icrontic_11 folded many WUs with it. The monitor came from CB. I bought the hard drive in this rig from DogDragon.
Still down in the basement is IC11. It has parts from several Icrontic members, most notably Mt_Goat, who sold me all of the watercooling parts at a great price. While the list of donors has disappeared, I believe Leonardo and muddockter contributed some of the original parts, as well.
There's a little bit of Icrontic in all of my rigs, and that provides a reason beyond pure nostalgia to find ways I can still use and celebrate this old hunk of junk that I'm typing on. That, and I just discovered that this cheezy old FX 5200 can play HL2DM.
Watch out for my crossbow - unless you like getting owned by some guy with a vintage ball mouse.
I dragged up a heavy mid-tower that contains some of the former parts of my main rig, which have spent most of their time being neglected ever since I moved to the K8 platform. It has my Abit NF7-S, which I once coveted for its overclocking ability and sweet Soundstorm audio. A mobile Barton Athlon XP, built for lower voltage than what would be thrown at it once I started experimenting with water cooling. The rest, hand-me-down hard drives, some PC-2700 RAM that I don't know how I came across, and a laughable GeForce FX 5200 that Buddy J gave me once, so that I could experience Nvidia's lost generation.
The most ridiculous part has to be the cooler that I've got strapped onto the Barton, though. It represents the pinnacle of 2002's air cooling technology. What I have on here is perhaps the worst, loudest, copper heat pipe cooler ever made.
I don't know the brand, but in 2002, 60mm screaming HSFs were still common. It was this cooler that made me doubt that heat pipes would ever work. But, it was the only spare cooler in my parts box, so now, in my dining room, it screams its vengeance for being sentenced to dank basement solitude for so many years.
My dining room is where the beast is set up. While the case, a Noblesse that I had lusted over for perhaps two years before I bought, is somewhat attractive, the mismatched peripherals span generations and barriers of good taste. A 17" CRT with some burn-in that CB gave me two LANs ago, some old Dell-issue harman/kardon speakers from an ex-girlfriend, a Sun 3-button USB ball mouse (that CrazyJoe rocked in this year's Epic TF2 tournament), and a keyboard from a PowerMac G4. A terrible, terrible keyboard that offers none of the right kind of feedback.
And yet, the rig that I set up here, just to see if there was anything I needed to get off the hard drive, fixes my attention. You see, it tricked me. The default multipliers of mobile Bartons aren't recognized on desktop boards, so I clearly had to go into the BIOS to speed it up from the 500 Mhz the board decided to run it at. But I couldn't remember the stock speed, exactly. I set it to 1333, figuring that's safe. Hours later, I realize that Folding had resumed - it was still set to run as a service. I hadn't yet gotten the wireless connection working, so the WU it was crunching on is practically vintage. At least retro.
I killed the service, and chide Folding@Home for risking untold ills by lighting a fire under a processor with only old, crusty thermal paste and the aforementioned suckass HSF to dissipate the heat. I then fix the wireless adapter, only to download drivers to get the finicky old GeForce FX to work, you understand. I had never seen 4-bit color in Windows XP before, and I had seen enough.
While restarting, I realize that it's only running at 133 Mhz FSB. Well, that's a waste of RAM. I kick it up to 166 to match the PC 2700. It is at this point that I realized I was already in a downward spiral, and yet decided to restart Folding anyway. I thought I was curious how fast it would fold. "Really damn slow," anyone could have told me. But I needed to quantify.
Over an hour and a half to complete one percent at 1666 Mhz. Had I been fully possessed of my wits, that figure would have convinced me of the futility, or perhaps I would have at least paused to hear the laughter from those of you running GPU2 clients out there. Instead, the pathetic showing made me want to earn a smidgen more respect for the rig. I went back to the BIOS. 2 Ghz is a good place to start tweaking in earnest.
Perhaps this is a good time in this tale of love and circuits to pause, spare you further details, and get to the good part.
An old Socket A rig sits in my dining room, a patchwork of hand-me-down parts. That heatsink I hate? I remembered it came to me as Icrontic_11's first cooler, new in box, back in 2002. One of you Icrontians donated that to the cause, and loud or not, Icrontic_11 folded many WUs with it. The monitor came from CB. I bought the hard drive in this rig from DogDragon.
Still down in the basement is IC11. It has parts from several Icrontic members, most notably Mt_Goat, who sold me all of the watercooling parts at a great price. While the list of donors has disappeared, I believe Leonardo and muddockter contributed some of the original parts, as well.
There's a little bit of Icrontic in all of my rigs, and that provides a reason beyond pure nostalgia to find ways I can still use and celebrate this old hunk of junk that I'm typing on. That, and I just discovered that this cheezy old FX 5200 can play HL2DM.
Watch out for my crossbow - unless you like getting owned by some guy with a vintage ball mouse.
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Anyway, fixed now. Please put the shamehammer down, Keebs