NFOHump.com :: View topic - There's an awful lot of overclocking out there

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bogo24dk

Posts: 3043

Posted: Wed, 18th Jul 2007 06:57 Post subject: There's an awful lot of overclocking out there

Quote:

A bunch of us were going through some Windows crashes that people sent in by clicking the "Send Error Report" button in the crash dialog. And there were huge numbers of them that made no sense whatsoever. For example, there would be code sequences like this:

mov ecx, dword ptr [someValue]
mov eax, dword ptr [otherValue]
cmp ecx, eax
jnz generateErrorReport

Yet when we looked at the error report, the ecx and eax registers were equal! There were other crashes of a similar nature, where the CPU simply lots its marbles and did something "impossible".

We had to mark these crashes as "possibly hardware failure". Since the crash reports are sent anonymously, we have no way of contacting the submitter to ask them follow-up questions. (The ones that the group I was in was investigating were failures that were hit only once or twice, but were of the type that were deemed worthy of close investigation because the types of errors they uncovered—if valid—were serious.)

One of my colleagues had a large collection of failures where the program crashed at the instruction

xor eax, eax

How can you crash on an instruction that simply sets a register to zero? And yet there were hundreds of people crashing in precisely this way.

He went through all the published errata to see whether any of them would affect an "xor eax, eax" instruction. Nothing.

He sent email to some Intel people he knew to see if they could think of anything. [Aside from overclocking, of course. - Added because people apparently take my stories hyperliterally and require me to spell out the tiniest detail, even the stuff that is so obvious that it should go without saying. I didn't want to give away the story's punch line too soon!] They said that the only [other] thing they could think of was that perhaps somebody had mis-paired RAM on their motherboard, but their description of what sorts of things go wrong when you mis-pair didn't match this scenario.

Since the failure rate for this particular error was comparatively high (certainly higher than the one or two I was getting for the failures I was looking at), he requested that the next ten people to encounter this error be given the opportunity to leave their email address and telephone number so that he could call them and ask follow-up questions. Some time later, he got word that ten people took him up on this offer, and he sent each of them e-mail asking them various questions about their hardware configurations, including whether they were overclocking. [- Continuing from above aside: See? Obviously overclocking was considered as a possibility.]

Five people responded saying, "Oh, yes, I'm overclocking. Is that a problem?"

The other half said, "What's overclocking?" He called them and walked them through some configuration information and was able to conclude that they were indeed all overclocked. But these people were not overclocking on purpose. The computer was already overclocked when they bought it. These "stealth overclocked" computers came from small, independent "Bob's Computer Store"-type shops, not from one of the major computer manufacturers or retailers.

For both groups, he suggested that they stop overclocking or at least not overclock as aggressively. And in all cases, the people reported that their computer that used to crash regularly now runs smoothly.

Moral of the story: There's a lot of overclocking out there, and it makes Windows look bad.

I wonder if it'd be possible to detect overclocking from software and put up a warning in the crash dialog, "It appears that your computer is overclocked. This may cause random crashes. Try running the CPU at its rated speed to improve stability." But it takes only one false positive to get people saying, "Oh, there goes Microsoft blaming other people for its buggy software again."

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/04/12/407562.aspx

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thudo

Posts: 6309
Location: Mellonville North, Canada

Posted: Wed, 18th Jul 2007 20:11 Post subject:	Quick Quote Quote

Bah.. Overclocking rules when you KNOW what you are doing and bought the RIGHT hardware to do it on. I get mid-to-high end systems for $1100 w/taxes and overclock CPU, RAM, and GPU by as much as 40%. If I bought a little better CPU cooler or case I could go higher on air cooling but whats an 84year old gonna complain when their running their C2D from 2.13 to a fully and absolutely rock-solid 2.75Ghz? Remember, its also all about the burn-in test too to ensure max stability. You need those tools to ensure your handy work is stable. I do find it super-odd these small companies would bother OC'ing unless they told the customer they were getting "certain specs" then the company got cheaper stuff and OC'ed it to mask its real speed. Bah. MSI GT72S 6QF Dominator Pro S 29th Anniversary Intel i7 6820HK @ 4.0Ghz, 32GB DDR4-2133 RAM, 2x256GB Raid0 Toshiba NVMe 2.5 inch PCIe SSD, Nvidia Geforce GTX 980 OC'ed 200+ Core / 200+ Mem, 17.3 inch LG IPS HD Display @ 75Hz, Intel 7265AC Wifi, Windows 10 Pro BIOS version: .112 EC Firmware version: .105 Current Broadband speed record: 329.1 Mb/sec down // 21.73 Mb/sec up http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/3933292.png

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bogo24dk

Posts: 3043

Posted: Thu, 19th Jul 2007 02:08 Post subject:

thudo wrote:

Bah.. Overclocking rules when you KNOW what you are doing and bought the RIGHT hardware to do it on. I get mid-to-high end systems for $1100 w/taxes and overclock CPU, RAM, and GPU by as much as 40%. If I bought a little better CPU cooler or case I could go higher on air cooling but whats an 84year old gonna complain when their running their C2D from 2.13 to a fully and absolutely rock-solid 2.75Ghz? Remember, its also all about the burn-in test too to ensure max stability. You need those tools to ensure your handy work is stable.

I do find it super-odd these small companies would bother OC'ing unless they told the customer they were getting "certain specs" then the company got cheaper stuff and OC'ed it to mask its real speed. Bah.

Naa this tactics are quite common in the computer sale bussines. I agree if you know what you do then it's ok. And you know if you over clocked and suddenly your windows begins to crash quite often what to do. But in case of grandma or Joe the shoe store owner or many other people. They don't know nothing about those things. Their expectation in most cases are to open the computer press internet explorer and surf the net. Other then that its beyond their limits. And of course those people aren't the ones who are surfing on Nforce.nl.

That's why i think the company's who are doing this need to be sued .

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