Super Extreme Crazy Overclocking
Part Two


I am displaying the same basic story, except from our two points of view. This is to attempt to avoid "creative differences."
Read both for the full story. keep in mind we didn't collaborate all that much on these...
Don't try this at home. We are untrained amateurs.
Dialogue 1
Dialogue 2

Now, since this is an Athlon Thunderbird we are trying to overclock, we needed to enable the overclocking function on the chip itself. This is relatively simple, a few exposed wires on the surface of the chip just need to be connected. Believe it or not, this can be accomplished with a pencil, the graphite lead conducts electricity. Then we thought, why not connect a few more for good luck? Throughout all off this, all I could think of is "Why the heck am I drawing on a $350 CPU!!!" Just didn't seem like the sort of thing one ought to do with a high precision computer component. With this done we kept the case open to improve ventilation.
Now, down to the rest of the story. We have these pipes going all the way to Canada and coming back. Pretty cool stuff. Glaciers and all that. There was one problem, however, we had never overclocked anything like this before. We'd just pumped all this florinert into Chris' basement and we had to enable part of the processor before we could actually overclock. So we decided to start playing with things at random. After all, they couldn't make it so that we could hurt the thing, right? It was Chris' processor anyway so I convinced him everything would be fine despite any overwhelming objections that lingered in the background (and foreground) of my mind.
     It took a "few" minutes for the fluid to really start pumping and over half a day for the cold stuff to reach us. The room cooled off very quickly. in less than 4 hours, the room was down to like 30 degrees and dropping. We decided this was a good time to initiate the benchmarking. For safety reasons we limited and stays in the "tank" to five minutes. It was getting juuuust a little cold. Anyway, we turned on the computer (after tweaking processor speed in BIOS) and started up the benchmarking program. It was working fairly well, but only the CPU was only hitting about 1200MHz. This wasn't vary goo, so we modified the setup. The cold liquid was routed to an area right next to the case, pretty much shooting right at it. This lowered the temp a bit, now the thing was at around 10 degrees. Needless to say we were dissapointed. And turning blue. And losing feeling in our limbs.
Thankfully he had a Athlon Thunderbird 900, so all we had to do to change the clock settings is run a pencil over part of it. We weren't sure exactly which points to connect though. Frustrated once more, we remained determined. So we got a pencil and connected all the dots to all the other dots. It seemed logical that if you wanted to overclock it some, you connect some dots (or so the other pages said). If you want to overclock it the most, you connect all the dots (that's logical right?). Then we thought, maybe if we covered the the rest in graphite, it would go the fastest it possibly could! Maybe even faster! So we drew on that thing like it was a circle in a multiple choice scantron sheet. Fifteen minutes and one processor covered in graphite later, we started up the computer.
We went out and bought like 50 gallons of liquid helium. Using a top-secret method we circulated the liquid helium into heat syncs around the processor (it involved hoses). After getting that sort of circulating we tried again. This time we hit paydirt. After securing hte heat sync to the CPU a little better we got some real success (6.4GHz!!!). Just look at the screenshot of the benchmark program if you don't believe me.
SUCCESS! But still, we had problems. Not a bad problem, mind you. You see, when the computer booted up, it didn't have enough room to display the clock speed. When we actually booted into Windows, we loaded up a benchmark program which told us that the processor was running at some 6.4 GIGAHERTZ!!! Needless to say we were very excited. We immediately started up Quake 3 Arena. To our surprise, we were able to run both the resolution and the bit depth up further than the monitor could handle. (Further than we thought any monitor could!) It was great! From what we can figure cooling the processor, motherboard, hard drive, and the graphics card (A Creative GeForce 2, very nice to start with anyway) really made a difference. So much of a difference that we've decided to keep his basement submerged in florinert and work on developing new, better technologies to play while submerged. We're already trying to get an old air tank and are working on a more reliable underwater breathing system (passing out causes some evil headaches). Our helmets will attach to a sort of airlock that is constantly attached to the monitor. We just hook the two together and we have a clear view to the monitor so there's no weird tint. We hope to have a version soon that is flexible because our necks are getting sore trying out the prototypes that stay in one spot.

 

Well, we will probably write more on this in a while, but right now all I will say is that it's freaking COLD!!! I guess liquid helium will do that... So, I'll finish up when I catch up with work and other things.
 
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