September 5, 2000

11:02 PM

These guys built a casefor their computer out of a refrigerator they got at WalMart, and they're cooling the CPU using alcohol at -18 degrees. The lengths to which some people will go to overclock are beyond belief. No word on how fast the mother is, though.
posted by Steven Den Beste (7 comments total)

What good is all this overclocking? A desperate attempt to get better frame rates in quake?
posted by mathowie at 11:09 PM on September 5, 2000

It will make AOL go faster.
posted by Brilliantcrank at 11:35 PM on September 5, 2000

Overclockers now are the guys who would have been working on their hot-rod engines 40 years ago; it doesn't have any point, it's fun in its own right.

In May I replaced the CPU and motherboard on this computer and then had a surprisingly enjoyable month hunting down tools and drivers and trying various ways to tune the BIOS for maximum performance and seeing how fast I could get the FSB to run. It's really quite a lot of fun. Though a true overclocker would sneer at me, since I only gained 12%. I never figured out how to make 15% run reliably, but 12% has been solid as a rock for weeks. I think I could get more if I replaced my PC100 RAM with PC133 CAS2 RAM, but frankly it's not worth it to me because I really don't need the speed. But messing with it was a kick.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 12:07 AM on September 6, 2000

It's sort of got a certain mystique to it, especially when you see whacked out stuff like this. But I've gotten an easy 10% increase in my processor speed with just a simple change in my BIOS. Most newer (Intel chip-based) motherboards have a way of changing the bus speed without reaching into the nitty gritty confines of your hardware just by playing around with the BIOS. Some of the more popular motherboard makers to include this feature are Abit, Asus and Soyo.

Basically, as long as you're not messing around with the voltages (cuz that's what fries your cpu) and you don't crush your cpu with a big fat Golden Orb heat sink (it's been known to happen), you can't do much damage to your computer.

I'd say more, but read HardOCP for the lowdown. Thresh's Firingsquad is a nice place to look for this information too.

I notice Steven cross-posts a lot of Kyle's stuff off HardOCP onto MeFi... Which is cool, cuz a lot of people wouldn't normally visit Kyle's site.
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 2:04 AM on September 6, 2000

Oh and Matt, the real hardcore gamers will do ANYTHING to squeeze out an extra few framerates in Q3 even if it means adding a few degrees to a room's ambient temperature and running Freon through your computer case. :)
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 2:05 AM on September 6, 2000

The guys at Temple Of Thee Lemur did this as a wind up ages ago, which leads me to believe that perhaps this one is too. The TOTL one was much funnier though....
posted by Jofus at 5:04 AM on September 6, 2000

No word on how fast the mother is, though.

They do actually mention on the site's main page:

"Well, let me explain.. when we built the computerator we only had a celeron 500 to test in it.. we successfully got the cpu up to 624 and it ran stable but the chip wouldn't go any higher.. so we have a pentium 2 333mhz cpu that were gonna test this week so check back for bookmarks later this week."


posted by webmutant at 9:08 AM on September 6, 2000