20 Things They Don't Want You to Know
We reveal some of what vendors are keeping mum, such as: You never have to pay full price, extended warranties rarely pay for themselves, and the big sites do have customer service numbers.
Eric Dahl
From the October 2005 issue of PC World magazine

Your CPU May Be Much Faster Than You Think

Here's a CPU manufacturing secret: Most CPUs can be overclocked to run at least a bit faster than usual, giving your PC a free speed boost. And on some rare occasions, low-end chips are capable of running just as fast as much more highly priced CPUs. But while overclocking can speed up your system, note that you must take care to properly cool your PC, or you might damage the CPU--and most system warranties won't cover that damage.

The big speed jumps usually come along when Intel or AMD has transitioned to a new manufacturing process and is getting great yields on even its high-end chips. When that happens, slower CPUs that use the same technology are ripe for overclocking. The classic example: Intel's Celeron 300A chip, a 300-MHz CPU that overclockers routinely ran at 450 MHz.

Check in periodically with enthusiast sites like Anandtech (and HardOCP--they go wild when those situations arise. To overclock most of today's CPUs, you bump up your computer's bus speed, either through the system's PC Setup (or BIOS) program or via a Windows-based utility such as NVidia's NTune.

Each time you increase the speed, you should use a utility like Motherboard Monitor to check the CPU's temperature while you stress the system by encoding video or playing a 3D game. If the core temperature rises above 60 degrees centigrade, or if you experience any system instability (crashes, corrupt graphics, etc.), roll back to the next-lowest setting and stay there.
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More at link:

• You Never Have to Pay Full Price
  
• Faster Shipping Isn't Always Faster
  
• You Can Kill the Messenger
  
• Extended Warranties Aren't Worth It
  
• You Too Can Exploit Windows' Bad Security
  
• You Can Save Big Money on Big-Name Software Packages
  
• That Dead Pixel on Your LCD May Not Be Covered
  
• Your Cell Phone's Been Crippled
  
• High-End Manufacturers Don't Always Make Their Products
  
• You Can Call Amazon, EBay, and Other Web Businesses
  
• Security Center Can Be Muted
  
• Game Consoles Are Hackable
  
• You Can Use an IPod to Move Music
  
• You Can Get a Human on the Phone
  
• MP3 Players Run Down Too Fast
  
• Useless Specs

PC World
complete article -- 11 pages

O_O. Better watch out, Bill Gates assination squad might be knockin on your door.. LMAO

Josh2022 wrote:

O_O. Better watch out, Bill Gates assination squad might be knockin on your door.. LMAO

But 16 of the 20 don't have anything to do with software.

Brilliant Larry and thanks for the heads up. This will be really useful for lots of our members.

Mac33 wrote:

Brilliant Larry and thanks for the heads up. This will be really useful for lots of our members.

Thanks Mac. I hope members click the link and check out the series of articles. It could have been posted as 20 separate posts, it's that good. I have a subscription to PC World, and it arrived yesterday with that as the cover story. I took one look at it and knew we needed to have it posted. Fortunately, PC World is one of those publications that allows anyone to view any of their magazine content online (unlike some other subscriptions I have) so it's exciting to get the magazine every month and see what our readers could benefit from.

Nice! I just wanted to mention, tho you probably already know this, is that if you are applying voltage to your cpu, you should try and keep your temps at 50-55, lower is better of course. But there in lies something else, each core can operate up to a set temperature, but each core also has a Max T_Case temperature, this determins when atual damage can occur, keep in mind, as you raise your core voltage, this cielling go's down. as illustrated in this helpful chart Here

Quote:

This is a new type of program, which checks AMD64 CPUs for their maximum rated case temp or TCaseMax and reports the TDP which corresponds to the processor in question. On most AMD processors TCaseMax and TDP values are constant, and depend on CPU type and model, but on the E Revision chips, both this values and the default voltage are variable. These are the chips that have variable values: Athlon64 (Venice, San Diego) Athlon64 FX (San Diego) Athlon64 X2 (Manchester, Toledo) All Rev E Opterons and Dual Core Opterons What this all means is this: On 90nm manufacturing process, the power leakage of transistors on individual processors differs greatly, this is why AMD implemented TCaseMax. Each CPU has a different TDP rating, here's how it works: A program reads the TCaseMax value off the CPU, then depending on the processor (CPU type like A64, Opteron;CPU Rating like 3500+, 146) it finds the processor's Thermal Profile (If you download the "AMD Opteron™ Processor Power and Thermal Data Sheet" and look at pages 10-11 you'll see the different thermal profiles). When the thermal profile is determined, the program finds the TDP rating that corresponds to the CPU's TCaseMax value. So in a few words, the higher the TCaseMax, the higher the TDP of a processor will be (the transistor leakage is higher), so the processor will run hotter. Several people have reported that the Opterons rated at 71C TCaseMax were pretty hot. On the other side these processors will be able to reach higher clock speeds. That is why we see that on average processors with higher TCaseMax can usually reach higher CPU speeds when overclocked. Every CPU type (A64, FX, X2, Opteron, DC Opteron) has a different thermal profile, that is why you see that on an FX a TCaseMax rating can be "only" 57C and it'll overclock way better than an A64 with a 57C TCaseMax rating. That is because at 57C TCaseMax, an FX has a TDP of 77W while the A64 has a TDP of 44W.

Proggy can be downloaded at This page.