Dream Machine

[lostcowboy]

Hi Doug, you said Guess one area I am confused
is why folks overclock their CPU. Its as if they cannot buy a CPU
having the clock speed they want, or that extra 10% requires something
like a double in CPU price for one having that speed by default.
You have it basic understanding of why they try to do it. To try to get some extra speed out of it. It all comes down to the quality control tests that the CPU companies do. The more tests the company does the more that CPU chip costs. You understand I am talking in general here. This is only a basic example here. Lets say they make 1000 chips they do the basic test just to make sure that the chips work at the minimum speed, say out of 1000 you have 900 good chips. You have a order for 500 cheap slow CPU's, you now have 400 chips, and you have a order for 200 medium speed chips, so you start testing the 400 at the higher speeds, so these chips have had two tests done on them, so they cost more. Lets say you get a order for 100 high speed chips, you test the remaining chips a third time at a higher speed. this is in the same model of chips you understand. So knowing this people started buying cheap chips, and trying to run them at the higher speeds. Some times it worked and some times it did not, the luck of the draw. Chip makers once they learned of this practice felt that they were lousing profits, so they came up with ways that you could not just speed up the chips. This war has been going on far a while. Some motherboard companies have got into the game to, If they make a motherboard where you can change a number of things like the voltages and the CPU oscillator speed, they found that the overclockers as they are called were willing to pay more for the boards. Of course there is a catch 22 in all this! Just because you raise the CPU speed, your programs and what not, may run at the same speed or very close to it. The CPU spends most of its time waiting! It spends the most time waiting on the human to do something, hit a key or do something with the mouse. The next slowest thing it waits on is the hard drive, the last is ram memory. There are things you can do to help speed up these things. The first is RAM, my home windows box says 128 MBs of ram recommended. Is that enough? Do this right click on the start bar and select task manager. In the task manager select performance. What we are interested in is, Commit Charge(K). Go ahead and run all the programs you normally have running. If (Commit Charge, peak) is less than (Physical Memory, Available) then buying more memory will speed up your system. The same thing goes with your hard drive, if you get one that has a faster rotation speed, it should be able to get data to the CPU faster, also look at hard drive buffer size, 2 megs of ram is common now, but you can get 8 meg buffer size. Another thing that can effect transfer speed is the primary( or front end) oscillator speed, on some mother boards you can adjust this with out effecting CPU speed. You change this in the bios screen. If you change this and your system freezes you may have to pull your system battery to get back to default settings!