Flashrom To Support Flashing ATI Graphics Cards

[energyman]

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.

[curaga]

Without overclocking features you wouldn't be able to underclock either, and that is (one way) how one can get lower power bill/energy consumption. If a certain cpu is sold at 3Ghz/1.35V, and you can lower it to 1.25V while not dropping speed, that can have a nice effect on the power usage without affecting performance.

[monraaf]

Well I have one of those energy efficient processors from AMD. It's supposed to have a clock speed from 1GHZ to 2.5GHZ. I've upped the bus speed in the bios, and it now runs from 1.1GHZ to 2.8GHZ, stable as a rock. Most of the time the CPU runs at 1.1GHZ and the power usage of my complete pc is between 52 and 62 watt. With CPU intensive tasks when the CPU is running at 2.8 GHZ I do really gain about 10% as to when it was 2.5GHZ, so why shouldn't I?

[energyman]

there is no need of oc features to be able to underclock.

[energyman]

Well I have one of those energy efficient processors from AMD. It's supposed to have a clock speed from 1GHZ to 2.5GHZ. I've upped the bus speed in the bios, and it now runs from 1.1GHZ to 2.8GHZ, stable as a rock. Most of the time the CPU runs at 1.1GHZ and the power usage of my complete pc is between 52 and 62 watt. With CPU intensive tasks when the CPU is running at 2.8 GHZ I do really gain about 10% as to when it was 2.5GHZ, so why shouldn't I?

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

[monraaf]

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

Well, if you push it to the extreme probably yes. Moderate overclocking never had a negative impact for me.

[energyman]

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?

[Kano]

Thats very simple: the cheaper chips sell better. So in case you need more cheaper chips then just relabel better ones if your yield is too high for the top chips. Thats not much differnet to the X3 cpus from AMD, lots of em work as X4 too. It is a big amount of marketing involved what you really write on the box. Of couse you can be unlucky too that your specific cpu has got no good oc range, so when you don't want to play and run checktools like Prime95 for serveral hours to check stability better buy a higher rated chip directly. But i think nothing is wrong when you oc your cpu - just verify the stability and correctness, as thats the major point when you need correct results. When you only play games and it does not hurt you when the system crashes then maybe skip that step, but i never would use a system thats not 100% working fine.

[lordmozilla]

Without overclocking features you wouldn't be able to underclock either, and that is (one way) how one can get lower power bill/energy consumption. If a certain cpu is sold at 3Ghz/1.35V, and you can lower it to 1.25V while not dropping speed, that can have a nice effect on the power usage without affecting performance.

The reason you can underclock is because it's great for laptops. The tech was brought in for desktops that simple.

[curaga]

The options to tweak voltage and speed, I consider them OC features and they were first brought for OC. If they weren't there, one could not tune them downwards either.

No, I don't mean speedstep or the other auto-things initially from laptop cpus.