[NEWS] - Intel invents overclock deterrent method

blakerwry

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Handruin said:
CHIP GIANT INTEL appears to have invented a cunning method which after detecting overclocking on a microprocessor can then prevent such overclocking by reducing the clock rate on a microprocessor.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8518

Most processors, explains the patent, can be clocked at frequencies much greater than the marked frequencies, and that could mean distributors and/or resellers remarking chips at higher frequencies and then selling them at higher prices.

"Unscrupulous resellers and/or distributors may purchase less expensive processors that are rated at lower clock frequencies and then remark those processor at higher clock frequencies, a procedure known as over-clocking".

LOLOLOLOLOL
 

CougTek

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"Unscrupulous resellers and/or distributors may purchase less expensive processors that are rated at lower clock frequencies and then remark those processor at higher clock frequencies, a procedure known as over-clocking".
You gotta be kidding me. Overclocking? Nope. The above is named remarking. Overclocking is the fact of running a chip above its default specifications. It is legal. Remarking isn't. Remarking involves overclocking. Overclocking doesn't involve remarking.
 

honold

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i would be willing to wager that remarking is way worse than (intentional or otherwise) overclocking.

consider asia.
 

mubs

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But really, what good does it do for people buying just the processor? You'd have to go thru hell to return it after you've stuck it in a motherboard and found out that it doesn't run at the claimed speed. It's not like the proc is DOA; it works, doesn't it?
 

Tannin

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My word, they are bright boys at Intel. Ye Gods! They've discovered processor remarking already! They sure are quick on the uptake. Hell, give 'em another 10,000 years and they might invent the wheel.
 

Tea

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So, Tannin, how many Intel processors have you bought recently? Let's say ... oh ... in the last 12 months.

(Err ... Two?)

P-4s, yes. But what about Celerons?

(Unh ... I think I bought a couple of 1100s not long ago. Not for myself, of course, I like things that go fast - i.e., Athlons.)

And when was the last time you overclocked an Intel processor?

(Ahh ... That would be the Pentium MMX-166 I ran at 75MHz FSB before I replaced it with a 6x86MX-200. Or was it a K6-233? No, the 233 came later. Unh ... about ... er ... would that be five years?)

Yeah. Probably about that long. And, for your own personal use, I mean, and not counting notebooks, when was the last time you bought an Intel processor?

(Ahh ... That would also be the Pentium MMX-166. Unless you count the office Smoothie - that's a Pentium 133. Oh yeah, and the DOS box, that's ... ah ... a Pentium MMX-200, I think.)

So, on the whole, would it be fair to say that you are not too worried about Intel chips and overclocking?

(Yup. Right on the nose, hairy one. They can do whatever they like, but I won't be buying anything with an Intel badge until they offer better price-performance than the AMD parts.)

Don't hold your breath, bald one.

(I'm not bald!)

No, but you probably will be before Intel offer better chips than AMD make.

(Well ... I guess so. But by then I'll be calling you "small grey one".)
 

honold

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intel is doing fine vs amd in price/performance around the 2.4ghz range compared to an amd with an nforce2
 

Tea

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Huh? Not even close. Oh, there are certain specialised things that the P-4 is very good at (I think Photoshop is one of them) but all round, they can't even match up model for model (e.g., 2200+ vs 2200), let alone $ for $ (e.g., 2400+ vs 2200).

Oh - but you said on an Nforce 2. Now there you have a point. The Nfoce II boards are so expensive that they level the price gap, make a 2200+ the same price as a P-4 2200. It's still faster though.

Honestly, I don't know why anyone buys the Nforce 2. It seems like a perfectly decent chipset, but no faster than a KT-400 (or at least not enough to notice), plus you get those weirdo drivers (well, not weird, just different), and you pay a heap more for it. I'm staying with VIA till further notice. Fast, cheap, reliable as sunrise. That's my kind of product. :)
 

honold

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333mhz bus vs 533mhz bus, amd loses (but not a wide margin) in the majority of available metrics at the same 'rating' (e.g. 2800+ vs 2.8)

xp2500+/333 costs $171us
p42.53/533 costs $179us
 

blakerwry

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Somehow i think tannin is selling the chips that are behind the price curve.. or at it... ie, the 2200+ for ~$100... while the 2.0gHz p4 northwood is ~$160

The 2200+ probably beats the 2.0 at most things a user would want to do, while costing 60% less. This is the price vs performance I believe Tannin was talking about.
 

blakerwry

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Don't forget that the cheapest p4 Northwood sold on newegg is the 1.8gHz @ ~$142... you can get an AthlonXP 1800+ for ~$65... here a similar performing iNTEL CPU costs double that of the Athlon.
 

honold

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well he's still contesting it when i'm clearly talking about the 2.4 range...

it's not some kind of holy war, it's fact. i use amd at work and intel at home btw.
 

Mercutio

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By my count there's about a $35 price difference between a P4 2.4/533 and an AMD XP2400, a difference of around 20%. That's a pretty big premium just to have something that says "Intel" on the package.
 

blakerwry

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honold said:
well he's still contesting it when i'm clearly talking about the 2.4 range...

it's not some kind of holy war, it's fact. i use amd at work and intel at home btw.

you're right... you did say the 2400+ range and he argued it... I use a mix of iNTEL and AMD stuff... infact I own 2 intel CPUs and 2 AMD ones.. and a cyrix...

intel:
486DX2
Celerwood 2.0gHz

AMD:
AthlonXP 1700+
Duron 1.3gHz

Cyrix:
486DX2


The 486s were great buys... no regrets...

The palomino 1700+ was purchased when say the 1900+ was top dawg... I paid close to $200 ($179 IIRC)for the CPU... Now that chip costs ~$50... looking back it probably evens out with the cost of getting a slower proccessor w/ this mobo and then upgrading later, simply because I've kept this CPU for a while without upgrading it.

My last two purchases were within 6 months: the Northwood Celeron and the Duron 1.3 (both obviously behind the price curve).. Both were decent deals, but I wish I could have bought the CPUs OEM since I had heatsinks for both... maybe I should have bought a t-bred OEM instead.. this is my only regret.

My next purchase will probably be a t-bred CPU to upgrade the one that im currently using in my Dragon+, unfortunately the dragon+ doesn't support most t-breds so I'll probably have to swap it with my AK32L. I'll definately be getting something behind the curve, perhaps a 2400+ or 2600+ when they become cheaper.
 

honold

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accubyte (as usual) has the best prices. i've ordered stuff from them for at least 5 years with no problems.
 

Mercutio

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You wouldn't like it so much if you've ever been there. Man those people are jerks. I made the mistake of driving over to Elmhurst to pick up some parts. Never again. Accubyte is evil.

(why: 1. Didn't honor pricewatch prices in-store 2. Accubyte has me set up as a reseller, but wouldn't accept my ID when I went to the store. Seriously, is Indiana ID so hard to come by 35 miles from the frickin' state line? 3. Didn't have the parts I CALLED AHEAD TO RESERVE that THEY SAID THEY HAD IN STOCK. 4. Sales doofus was condescending on a level I don't even tolerate in record store employees, tried to badger me into buying cheap crap when they didn't have what I asked for 5. and for the icing on the cake... by the time I got everything sorted out, their CC processing was down. They didn't know how to do manual credit card slips, and told me to go order on the web site. Could I use the web on site? No.)


WRT XP2400s v. P4-2400/533s, pricewatch is showing me $121 for the AMD, $152 for the P4. $30ish. $130 P4 2.4s presumably WOULD suck less (bit of hyperbole: what I mean is, why pay for a $150 chip that does exactly the same amount of work as the $130 one?) than $150 ones, but I'm not seeing any evidence of that.
 

honold

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okay above 2.4 :)

i would buy a 2.4/intel chipset board just to assure a 4in1/wcpredit/hassle/etc-free experience, but that's worth $30 to me.

i can definitely see how anybody at or below 2.4 would buy amd, but above that it doesn't make sense to me.
 

Mercutio

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When you get into the realm of $300 or $500 chips, there's less than $10 price difference between Intel and AMD (and Intel is mostly on the lower side) BUT that's also only a 2-3% difference, vs. 20% on the lower end of things.

Point of fact, I also can't think of a compelling argument for buying a $500 CPU to begin with. Anything I need a 3GHz machine to do, today, I can probably do better on 2 2GHz machines, and I can probably build those for less than one 3GHz machine costs.

... and that pretty much sums up my "horde of low-end-but-current machines" philosophy.
 

e_dawg

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Tea said:
Honestly, I don't know why anyone buys the Nforce 2. It seems like a perfectly decent chipset, but no faster than a KT-400 (or at least not enough to notice), plus you get those weirdo drivers (well, not weird, just different), and you pay a heap more for it. I'm staying with VIA till further notice. Fast, cheap, reliable as sunrise. That's my kind of product. :)

VIA make good chipsets? Maybe they have improved recently, but I still have nightmares of their southbridges from hell and the "continuous development process" of their buggy drivers.
 

e_dawg

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If I use the IDE bus (transferring files) or accessing a CD and am playing audio at the same time, not only does it skip (which is understandable), but it locks up the sound card, requiring me to reset the sound card (either by resetting the computer or by putting it to sleep and waking it up again). Concurrnet use of IDE and PCI devices have caused problems in VIA southbridges to the point where it has been a known problem for the 686 series of southbridges, and from what I heard from friends with other VIA chipsets, it is not limited to the 686 southbridges either.
 

blakerwry

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e_dawg said:
If I use the IDE bus (transferring files) or accessing a CD and am playing audio at the same time, not only does it skip (which is understandable), but it locks up the sound card, requiring me to reset the sound card (either by resetting the computer or by putting it to sleep and waking it up again). Concurrnet use of IDE and PCI devices have caused problems in VIA southbridges to the point where it has been a known problem for the 686 series of southbridges, and from what I heard from friends with other VIA chipsets, it is not limited to the 686 southbridges either.

With my kt133 board witha 686a southbridge only in win2k did i ever experience sound choppyness.. this occured only under heavy I/O dtransfer while playing audio in winamp via either an SB Live and to a lesser extent my TBSC... it could have very well been CPU usage given that I had a 2x 75gxp RAID 0 setup on a slotA Athlon 750 and the forementioned chipset.

I don't have the same problem with my Soyo dragon+ (kt266a w/ 8233 SB) using either a tbsc or fortissimo II.

And in Linux and win9x i haven't had a problem with the ak32L's software ac97 sound (kt266 w/ 8233 SB) either... but I don't play much sound on it or even use it anymore(it's away on loan). At the moment, however, it's also only using a 5400rpm 10gb drive and a 4x2x24x CD-RW, so there aren't any "heavy" I/O operations being performed.
 

e_dawg

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I always thought it was common knowledge VIA southbridges were crap. For example, the relatively common audio and data corruption bug: it affected many KT133(A) chipsets and was not caused by the SB Live, nor is it limited to the specific combination of KT133A northbridge + SB Live sound card + 686B southbridge, despite what VIA would have you believe. Furthermore, the various fixes did not eliminate all problems.

If you were wondering, I did not have an SB Live, but rather, an Aureal 8830 based Diamond MX300 card, and I did not have a 686B southbridge, but rather the original 686. Same problem, and no fix despite using various latency patches and 4-in-1 updates. I even used WPCREDIT to try various settings to the southbridge registers to no avail.

And it's not just sound and data corruption problems that affect the VIA southbridges, but VIA IDE controllers have often yielded slower maximal transfer rates. I have seen several tests where a ATA-66 compatible VIA based motherboard maxed out at 45 MB/s, and an ATA-100 compatible VIA based mobo maxing out at 80 MB/s.

"Data-corruption bug hits VIA chipsets"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/18267.html

"I had hoped some months ago I would never have to write another news piece or article about a difficulty in VIA's chipsets. I had sincerely hoped Darth VIA had passed on into the annals of history. It's not to be, though: tecChannel is reporting that they have received confirmation that VIA chipsets, from the brand-new KT266A all the way back to the venerable MVP3, suffer from a PCI bug..."
http://tech-report.com/onearticle.x/3244

"Perhaps some were too quick to blame Creative for the SBLive! problems a while back. Although the SBLive! demands quite a bit from the PCI bus, it's hardly Creative's fault that VIA can't seem to get data rate of its PCI bus up to par... The problems found, especially with the frequent interruptions of data transfers on the PCI bus of VIA's chipsets, may also be responsible for many of the compatibility issues found with their products in the past... As a consequence, we can currently not recommend VIA chipsets for professional users who demand high performance from their hard drives and think about setting up RAID configurations. This includes video editing, small- and medium-business servers and workstations for graphics- and audio-editing."
http://tech-report.com/onearticle.x/3280

"I'm starting to believe the claims of a problem with the VIA PCI bus, as documented by TecChannel. I believe I know which timer is interrupting the bus, and I know how to disable the timer, but I believe that SoundBlaster audio will suffer if I do. If I'm right, then the problem is as follows. VIA's PCI controller contains an "arbitration" timer that will detect when a PCI device has used the bus too long. This timer should be triggered when another device needs to use the PCI bus. But VIA's timer is being triggered when no other device needs the bus. As a result, no device can continuously use the bus for longer than the length of the timer."
http://tech-report.com/onearticle.x/3303
 

e_dawg

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Oh, yes, I am very happy since I have left the plague of ATI and VIA behind. Ironically, I hear that both ATI and VIA have turned things around just as I have left them behind :)
 

Tannin

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office-2200.png


gaming-2200.png


contentwinstone-2200.png


.
.
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.

Case closed
 

CougTek

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Tony,

While I won't advance myself regarding what's the fastest at similar rating between the P4 and the Athlon XP (because the answer varies depending on what applications you intend to use), quoting figures taken from AMD's web site as proof for your position will not be very persuavive to the eyes of a crowd composed of people with relatively high technical background.

With that being written, for 90% of my customers and probably 80-90% of PC customers in general, AMD's current low-rating Athlon XP T'bred are better values than Intel's Pentium 4 processors. Why? Because the 50-100$ Athlon XP already offer more than enough processing power for the overwhelming majority of PC users. And at this price point, Intel's offers are down right pathetic compared to AMD's.
 

e_dawg

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There is very little practical difference in performance between Intel and AMD CPU's. IMO, one should focus on heat/power consumption, choice of motherboards and chipsets that accompany each CPU, and, obviously, price. Chances are, if price is your main consideration, AMD will be the better choice. Heat/power consumption... Intel. Mobos and chipsets... has Intel had a dominant chipset since the 440BX? With the exception of the buggy VIA 686 southbridge equipped boards, AMD should have the advantage here.
 

Mercutio

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Just to echo what time said, I can't recall running into the problems you initially describe, e_dawg. If I had anything bad to say about Via boards it'd probably be that IDE performance isn't all that great. That's pretty much the whole list.
"Skippy" sound when playing a CD digitally in Win2000 (ie without the CD audio cable, through IDE), while doing large data transfers, sure, but that at least makes sense, and I've seen that on AMD751 and Intel 815 boards, too.

Weird.
 

honold

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intel has been rocking out on chipsets since the 850 pretty much. most of the 845 series rules.
 

Tea

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blakerwry said:
(uncited, unexplained image)

Don't be ridiculous, Blakewry. Coug, the reason Tannin didn't bother to cite detais and sources is precisely because this is a a "crowd composed of people with relatively high technical background". Nobody reading this page should need to be bored with all the usual details for this stuff, as they will all have seen much the same benchmark results in a dozen different places already, if not for the 2200s, then for the various other models.

(He actually had all the boring crap included in the images at first, but I told him to crop them so as not to waste bandwidth with the obvious - i.e., that these are orthodox figures, generated in the orthodox ways, using the obvious components - Intel i845 chipset on the one, VIA on the other - a KT-333 I think it was.)

There is no point in citing specifics when the broad generality of the figures is the same everywhere you look. These simply happend to be the handiest images the old boy had around.

PS: it's not from AMD's website, BTW. Not that it matters..
 
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