Talk:Underclocking
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Underclocking competitions?
- Who knows, but I'll tender my entry now :) Acer NoteLite 350, originally a gonad-scorching P120 (with the option of a P133 O_O), will happily underclock to 75... 66... 60... 50mhz... even 33 if you're committed to energy saving! I found 60 to be a good compromise, made a tired battery run a lot longer and stopped my thighs from cooking, without sacrificing very much performance; basically the system bus, memory etc are still at the same speed, just the CPU has the clock doubler removed. Occasionally clocked it up (66, 75) when having to run something more demanding, but not often. It's telling of how overpowered todays machines are (and how inefficient the code) that I was 'happily' (well, ok, it's only got a VGA rez LCD..) using it for MS Office applications (inc powerpoint and access!) for college this time last year; it's 800/1733mhz replacement was only bought in March (and spends most of it's time at 800mhz unless i'm running the one modern application i have that benefits from high CPU speed, and is worth the considerable increase in heat, power consumption and fan noise, i.e. 25-30 watts vs 8-12w and no fan vs fan at 50% of its alarmingly powerful maximum... that app is folding@home, a HEAVY number crunching distributed computing effort).
- It's not the only one to have 'secret' low speed modes (50, 33 etc) either. I have a P-133 desktop that has a WORKING turbo switch (rare on a pentium!) that dropkicks the CPU to 33mhz - and I reckon it would do 25 if I lowered the bus to 50mhz (p75 mode). Also there's a website out there, a german one whose name I forget (I think you link to it via the OS Museum though) where they appear to be having a competition that's a variation on/requires innovative use of underclocking - "how wimpy a computer can you get each version of windows to run on?". The winner so far has managed to boot Windows XP (after waiting around for a couple hours..) on a machine with 20mb RAM... and an 8 - yes, 8 - mhz Pentium. Acheived by finding a secret 20mhz mode, then also discovering that unplugging the cooling fan from the motherboard triggered another secret emergency switch dropping the entire system to ISA bus speed (which, at 7.87mhz, was occasionally reported as "7mhz" by various programs). Hardcore, and a legendary effort - especially as any troubleshooting would have been a labourious affair, with some windows taking a full minute just to draw. They also found that with careful optimising, an 8mhz 386 (16mhz with turbo off) and 8mb will just about run Win98 SE (so why does my Duron 1600 make such a hash of it?), and an Athlon-64 with 1gb of memory gives Win 3.1 such a headache it will only run in "Standard" (aka 286) mode...
- Ah the fun you can have with a bit of surrepitous circuit bending :-D
- -tahrey 20/1/07
[edit] Rewrite of performance sections
Rewrite of the sections/sentences dealing with performance to better reflect the fact that, while you will lose performance, the loss is generally not as big as you might expect. DaanS 11:18, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Also removing the statement about faster access to RAM. The reasoning provided does not seem plausible to me, and I haven't been able to find any resources that back the statement. DaanS 11:24, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
