Flashrom To Support Flashing ATI Graphics Cards

[energyman]

options to 'tweak' voltage and speed always have been there because in former times both had been set manually. OC brought nothing.

[yesterday]

when you want a faster cpu, buy a faster cpu. No need to 'overclock'. And even 'low end' mobos come with oc feautres today because the idiotic online hardware testing sites are all about overclocking. And a lot less about the more important heat/energy consumption. Overclocking hurts for zero benefits except to keep a very small part of the population busy.

Please explain the difference between overclocking and buying a more expensive chip, like I have already asked about three times.

Once again you have said overclocking hurts the world, but have provided no explanation. You CLAIM have the manufacturers are wasting money on overclocking features, but you have provided no plausible reason to believe this assertion, since the vast majority of boards aren't promoted for their overclocking ability or are OEM.

You seem to believe that providing a menu in the BIOS is the same as designing for overclocking. Well, I already answered this, but once again I will say -- providing BIOS options doesn't mean a board has been DESIGNED for overclocking. A board has been designed for overclocking if the manufacturer spends time making sure that the changeable BIOS options actually work. Providing a menu to options is trivial. Making a board that can run with different settings than expected is much harder.

I have a number of low-end boards with all sorts of options, that don't overclock at all. Or look at the numerous reviews of low and midrange boards that don't overclock at all. What is the basis for your claim? And how do OEM boards fit into this claim? Are you claiming HP and Dell are responding to the evil review sites that barely feature their products?

because overclocking turns a deterministic machine into a random number generator.

why should a manufacturer sell a chip at lower speed, making less money?
Well, because it shows problems with the higher speeds. Just because you don't see the problems doesn't mean that they are not there. Do you constantly check your dmesg? Do you know what is caught by internal checks? Do you really know that everything on your harddisks is error free? A single bit flip in a picture, a video stream, game.. who sees that?

This is either plain sophistry or ignorance.

Manufacturers bin high performing parts as lower clocked chips because they adapt to the needs of the market. Intel can't just sell $1000 chips. Selling each and every chip at the highest speed it can run is a great way to go out of business. This is just basic business sense.

It all depends on what a manufacturer has planned to do with a particular stepping. It could be marked as top of the line, or if the demand is for lower priced chips, binned lower. Which is why your success in overclocking, while obviously dependent on each chip, is hugely related to the stepping of your chip. Later steppings can often give high OCs due to improvements in the fab process, for chips that have already been designated as the lower-end.

As such, it is perfectly plausible to get a chip that is perfectly stable at higher clockspeeds. You CAN test for stability, and many overclockers contribute to distributed computing projects which verify the accuracy of their data.

People have replied to every single point you have raised against overclocking, yet you can only reply with the same assertions. Repeating invalidated arguments doesn't actually strengthen your arguments at all. In fact, it only makes YOU look idiotic.

[yesterday]

options to 'tweak' voltage and speed always have been there because in former times both had been set manually. OC brought nothing.

Firstly, as I've already said, who cares what options are in the menu? That has nothing to do with how the board was designed.

Secondly, why don't you tell us which features BIOS makers are including that are costing the industry so much?

[energyman]

if you buy a faster chip it was tested and is guaranteed to run at the higher speed without errors. If you overclock you got a random number generator.

I posted that before. But hey, maybe your overclocking efforts make text disappear.

And about that 'bios menu' - the bios 'menu' only can show crap that is implemented. So to make voltages tweakable over a wide range you need more expensive hardware - and yes, the 10 cent/1000 units do make a difference. To be able to accomodate a wide range of voltages/clocks even out of spec you need a more complicated board layout - with more layers, which does increase the costs a lot. Do I really need to go on?

[deanjo]

If you overclock you got a random number generator.

That is a load of crap. As manufacturing improves, yields of chips are often artificially limited in speed to meet market demand for cheap lower end processors. This is why your lower end chips in a family are traditionally your best overclockers. Even the processor companies promote overclocking with there black editions, overclocking utils and reference BIOS. Pretty much every processor out there today has overclocking headroom which allows glitch free computation at higher then specified speeds. If anything overclockers are responsible for the higher quality of parts we see being used in boards across the full range. We aren't dealing with Cyrix 6x86's and K6-3's anymore these days.

[energyman]

*yawn* and who tells you that a chip is good? Also, as prices show you - better yield usually results in lower prices and even scrapping slower, cheaper chips. Why sell a good chip a lot cheaper, if you can sell it a bit cheaper?

You overclock, you risk your box (also, remember the electro-migration caused mass dying of P4 CPUs a couple of years ago? Yes, overclocking shortens the life span and increases the risk of failure, who would have thought of that?). But because of oc idiots everywhere prices INCREASE because 'bad overclocking boards' are RMAed and idiotic 'oc features' are built in everywhere.

[deanjo]

*yawn* and who tells you that a chip is good? Also, as prices show you - better yield usually results in lower prices and even scrapping slower, cheaper chips. Why sell a good chip a lot cheaper, if you can sell it a bit cheaper?

It's called market demand. This is what the real world goes by. Where a OEM may extend a models life 6 to 8 months before introducing it's replacement they still need those chips at lower specifications. It cost's no more to make a highend chip then a low end one. The lowend processors are what they base their projected profits from, not the extreme editions that they charge a dear premium for because it is a small market.

You overclock, you risk your box (also, remember the electro-migration caused mass dying of P4 CPUs a couple of years ago? Yes, overclocking shortens the life span and increases the risk of failure, who would have thought of that?). But because of oc idiots everywhere prices INCREASE because 'bad overclocking boards' are RMAed and idiotic 'oc features' are built in everywhere.

Again myth, the silicon on a chip in a given family of processor is built no different despite the speed. Yes, early on in a development cycle the better chips are binned for the "perfomance" editions and they charge premium price for those capabilities. As a product goes through it's product life cycle yields get better and the process refined but yet demand still exists for those lowerend chips for budget machines and thermal consideration. A 125 watt chip vs 65 watt chip are often pulled from the same piece of silicon. Underclock a performance chip to the 65 watt chip and you will see the same power consumption. Chip designs are done with maximum voltage in mind. I will bet you there are more boards RMA'd on any given day due to a PEBKAC situation vs a board that has been RMA'd because it has not overclocked well. Usually the overclockers are more tech savy then your off the street guy. They tend to know exponentially more then the average joe consumer or the avg joe tech support for that matter.

[yesterday]

you can probably work out that with the increased heat output of an overclocked processor, you could have saved on your electricity bill and therefore used that to fund a slightly more expensive processor.

Not quite. Retail stock voltages differ not only for chips with different speeds, but also in the same speed chips and chips from different revisions. Manufacturers typically have a range of acceptable voltages. For example, IIRC Intel specifies that the 8200 has a range of 0.8 to 1.35 V, and my stock voltage is 1.1V. I've seen others with a stock of 1.2 - 1.3, or 0.9. So, buying a retail box is no guarantee for lower power, just power draw within the threshold.

In terms of money saved, I have some simple calculations

On average, Australian electricity costs about $3.5 Kwd.The difference between an 8200 and 8600 in Australia in about $160. Of course, a voltage bump doesn't translate to 1KW of increased draw.

To save $160 dollars a year, I would have to draw around 125W extra from overclocking the chip : 3.5 * 125/1000 * 365 =~ 160.

But 110W is no where near the about of extra Watts drawn from a voltage bump. A voltage bump from 1.1 to 1.2, translates to about 20W. So, it would take me about 6 years to save the money for the faster chip. This is assuming 24/7 for 365 days.

If I really wanted to save money, I would take a high end graphics card like the 4890 (around 70W idle) and replace it with a lower end but still decent card like the 4670 (3W idle).

I'm not saying overclocking doesnt improve performance. It just doesnt do it in any actual viable and useful way. Sure your benchmarks are slightly higher. Thats the same as Gentoo guyrs that recompile everything with -O3 cause that'll make everything so much faster.

Well, this is purely subjective, and depends entirely on your task. In that regard, we could ask you why you bothered to by a Quad Core processor. There are plenty of people out there who think we should all be happy with PIIIs.

Of course, if you are saying that a clockspeed increase is the same as a compiler option, you have been grossly misinformed, and obviously your tasks are not compute bound. Once again, what's the difference between overclocking my 8200 and buying an e8600?

Hell it's a hobby, nothing more.

Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Playing games is a hobby. For many people, so is kernel hacking. So what?

[yesterday]

if you buy a faster chip it was tested and is guaranteed to run at the higher speed without errors. If you overclock you got a random number generator.

I posted that before. But hey, maybe your overclocking efforts make text disappear.

This has been now answered by three people. Maybe you have selective blindness.

Yes a faster retail chip is almost guaranteed to run at speed X. But that doesn't imply that a slower overclocked chip CANNOT run at the same speed with the same stability.

This isn't magic. It's just the realities of the fab process.

And about that 'bios menu' - the bios 'menu' only can show crap that is implemented. So to make voltages tweakable over a wide range you need more expensive hardware - and yes, the 10 cent/1000 units do make a difference. To be able to accomodate a wide range of voltages/clocks even out of spec you need a more complicated board layout - with more layers, which does increase the costs a lot. Do I really need to go on?

Boards NEED to be tweakable by requirement. Designers MUST implement a number of different voltage, timings, clock, and bus configurations to support a wide range of processors and memory modules. How else can my board function when I use different memory modules or processors with different speeds and bus speeds, if a variety of configuration options cannot be changed in some way? Exposing these configuration options via the BIOS menu doesn't imply that the board will work out of spec or with all possible configurations. It only implies that I can TRY to run it run it, with unsupported consequences.

Or are you saying that the time spent in menu design is what is driving up costs?

Do you own or have ever owned an OEM PC, or a low-end or non-overclocking board? They don't overclock well because they aren't designed for it. You can play with menus till the end of time, but on some boards changing the clock by 1Mhz won't get you past POST.