Classic British Flight Sim

Is this AMD programme worth getting, my CPU is running default mode (scared to touch it!)....
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_overdrive.aspx

and any thoughts on this, it has a good report on SOH with FSX going up 10FPS with more details!

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_fusion.aspx?p=1

Any thoughts and comments welclome, I am pretty much cut off from IT experts here

I'm not a fan of overclocking.

Have a nice car running well on 3 or 4 star, yes - it'll go like a bomb if you stick hundred octane in the tank, but the life expectancy will go downhill like a brick.....

Currently over clocking my AMD chip by about 15%, did it in the BIOS rather than using the program. Basically set it up by increasing the clock setting until it wouldn't reliably run programs and then stepped back a bit. FSX is actually quite a good program to base it on as it's very CPU intensive.
The car running on 4 star analogy is rubbish to be honest. Run a car on 5 star and you can advance the timing further without pre-ignition, this will allow you to run at higher revs/compression thus getting more power which is why the RAF saved up a reserve of 100 Octane pre the Battle of Britain to get extra performance from the Merlin. There will be more mechanical strain on the engine because it's running faster and producing more power.
Run a chip faster and err.. it's nothing like that. If a chip will run faster then it'll pretty much do it for life, the rating is based more on what the manufacturer can guarantee it'll run at reliably rather than any physical limit. As Intel and AMD are conservative on chip settings most can be overclocked, there's no physical strain on the chip per se it's just a question of how much faster you can run it before all kinds of quantum effects come in to play and electrons start merrily hopping onto the wrong circuit. You'd have to massively overclock a system to damage it.

SkippyBing wrote:The car running on 4 star analogy is rubbish to be honest. Run a car on 5 star and you can advance the timing further without pre-ignition, this will allow you to run at higher revs/compression thus getting more power which is why the RAF saved up a reserve of 100 Octane pre the Battle of Britain to get extra performance from the Merlin. There will be more mechanical strain on the engine because it's running faster and producing more power.

Not a good analogy either really. A car engine (unless it's used for racing or similar) will not spend a lot of time producing more than it's original output. It is certainly unlikely to run faster for most of the time. But thrash it and it may well break!

SkippyBing wrote: Run a chip faster and err.. it's nothing like that. If a chip will run faster then it'll pretty much do it for life, the rating is based more on what the manufacturer can guarantee it'll run at reliably rather than any physical limit. As Intel and AMD are conservative on chip settings most can be overclocked, there's no physical strain on the chip per se it's just a question of how much faster you can run it before all kinds of quantum effects come in to play and electrons start merrily hopping onto the wrong circuit. You'd have to massively overclock a system to damage it.

True, but it's life will be shortened. Although it's unlikely to be shortened sufficiently to interfere with the useful life of the part anyway. Permanent damage might not be done, but novice overclockers had better be familiar with CMOS resets and know their best BIOS settings off by heart before getting too cocky!

It takes a good deal of patience to get the maximum out of overclocking. Even then, keep an eye on your temperatures. And if the AMD heatsink is anything like the Intel one, vac all the crap out of the top on a regular basis.

James

Two things that will kill a CPU when overclocking.

1) Heat. If you don't have adequate cooling your cpu wont last very long if its always near its thermal limit. Higher speeds and voltage = more heat.

2) Electron Migration. This is when electrons "jump" from one circuit track to another amd eventually these get burnt in and you will find your cpu crashing a lot when that section of the cpu is used. This only happens when you feed your CPU loads of voltage to get very high speeds, but isn't really needed in this day and age. Back in the day I had to give my old Althon a massive voltage boost to get a mere 400mhz increase. Today I'm running nearly a 900mhz overclock on default voltage on my Intel quad-core Penryn

I always overclock my gear, its the whole "getting something for nothing" I'm running my cpu faster then one that costs near £1000 and I paid a quarter of that for it

You've also got to make sure that your motherboard and memory can handle the extra speed too.

Thanks guys, I will just limit myself to the latest video drivers :roll:

I Don't know about the UK but locally overclocking voids all the warranties on the PC's wehter or not that was the cause. :think:

Garry

That sounds a bit like driving over 70mph will void your vehicle warranty

They say it is due to altering the specs unofficially

Garry

I wonder how they tell, I mean if you overclock it for a bit and then set it back to default is there a record of it somewhere?