Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 21:22:19 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Sean Chittenden" <sean@chittenden.org>, "Bsd Newbie" <bsdneophyte@yahoo.com> Cc: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: overclocking and FreeBSD stablity... Message-ID: <00dc01c1329d$b0b523c0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010831173046.C23931@rand.tgd.net>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Sean Chittenden > >Slowaris wasn't meant to be a performance system and probably chokes >when it runs at speeds above 400Mhz. > Solaris runs fine on our Compaq 550Mhz system. My $0.02 is that the base of the troubles is the machine code that the compiler produces. I suspect that when a CPU is overclocked that unless the parts are good that the CPU is unable to execute SOME of it's opcodes, opcodes that produce certain electrical patterns inside of the CPU that may ring and generate electrical wave colissions. While I'm not an EE I do know that lengths of traces and such inside of a CPU are held to precise tolerances in order to deal with clock propagations and such. It's not just the cooling but when you overclock the CPU you can have signals arriving at internal parts of the CPU earlier than the designer intended. Consider that Solaris is compiled with Sun's compiler, FreeBSD is built with GCC, and Windows is built with Microsoft's compiler. Three very different compilers that produce much different opcodes when they encounter the same code structures. Certainly, you can overclock to a certain extent because most electrical parts are derated somewhat. But there are just so many variables that you can't just make blanket statements about overclocking. There's an overclockers website out there that contains a ton of information about overclocking along with testimonials from people who have experimented with overclocking different motherboard/CPU sets. Most of these folks run Windows and even within that crowd, there's wide variations in reliability between motherboard from different manufacturers that use the same CPU's. >> How is FreeBSD when it comes to an overclocked processor? Is it more >> stable? > >I have yet to hear of a report of an overclocked x86 system not working >with FreeBSD (if you don't overheat your system that is). I've seen plenty of systems that were _normally_ clocked that had weird hardware which caused problems with FreeBSD. I suspect that if you surveyed most overclockers you would find that they start out with normally clocked systems and make sure the software runs reliably, then they start overclocking. This is going to weed out most weak systems long before overclocking is going to be blamed for problems. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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