7 ms·
I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing softwar
by dpcx 7y ago
I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800, but alas.
- cptskippy 7y ago> Duron Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.
- sitzkrieg 7y agothe best part is that durons were better than celerons and cheaper for quite some time
- unixhero 7y agoThe duron had a pencil trick which unlocked it somehow. I don't remember the details.
- BrainInAJar 7y agoit was cheaper for AMD to produce one chip and then selectively cut the multiplier lines to differentiate sku for different market segments, so if you closed the lines again you'd get a different, faster clock multiplier
- Ice_cream_suit 7y agoThe pencil trick: "Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using [a] Pencil Hold your CPU in your left hand and look very closely at the CPU, so as to clearly see the L1 bridges. Use a business card to separate the bridges so that you do not connect the L1 bridges to each other. Work your way across the bridges from left to right (using a business card as a separation tool) and connect the bridges by rubbing the pencil back and forth over the bridges about twenty times until it is dark black, not the normal gold color. Make sure that all the bridges are reconnected, but not touching each other, and you are on your way. I know it sounds incredible, but that is actually all there is to it. Your processor, if done correctly, is ready to be overclocked. It can now be set to run at different clock frequencies, eliminating the need to increase the FSB." http://computer-communication.blogspot.com/2007/06/unlocking-duron-and-athlon-using-pencil_08.html http://computer-communication.blogspot.com/2007/06/unlocking...
- dylan604 7y agoI had never heard of this trick. I love it though. Reminds me of using a hole punch to make a double sided floppy disk from a cheaper priced single sided floppy.[0] Of course there was the AMD multi-core CPUs that had some of the cores disabled via software and sold at cheaper prices. Of course there were software hacks available to re-enable those cores. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-sided_disk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-sided_disk
- flyinghamster 7y agoOh, yes, the Phenom II 550 Black Edition. The early ones like the one I still have stashed away were an unsung bargain. My motherboard has a BIOS option to unlock extra cores, and so I got four cores for the price of two; at the stock clock speed all cores were rock-solid stable. I never did find any unbuffered 4GB ECC RAM sticks, so I had to settle for 4x1GB. With 16 GB and a SATA3 controller or PCIE-to-NVMe adapter it would still be a respectable performer today, in spite of the DDR2.
- ngcc_hk 7y agoWow! Old man and the puncher ... those were the days.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoSome would just have been faulty units : tried to turn my tri-core into a 4-core, but it didn't work...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Geeflow 7y agoI used this trick, and it did indeed work as intended. It was a little scary ("You want me to draw on my CPU?!?"), though.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jmuhlich 7y agoThe Duron had a set of circuit traces exposed on the ceramic chip carrier that were cut by laser at the factory to set the maximum allowed clock multiplier (and thus its final speed). You could reconnect all the cut traces with pencil lines and use a motherboard that let you set the multiplier directly to overclock freely.
- sizzle 7y agoWhat about athalons?
- alliao 7y agoCeleron 300A, the relative poorer man's Pentium
- wtallis 7y agoWeren't they also supported by the Abit BP6 motherboard, letting you use two of them as poorer man's Xeons?
- Zenst 7y agoYes, I owned two of those - alas they ended up being the period of bad capacitors but for the money - wow. Was amazing and for many, one of the only dual cpu systems they ever owned as a home user - even to this day unless you buy a cheap second hand workstations/server platform of ebay or the like.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rootusrootus 7y agoIndeed they were. I had that exact setup. Overclocked the hell out of them. Unlike the 550 MHz someone else suggested, I'm 97.6% sure I only had them clocked at 450 MHz.
- StillBored 7y agoI built a bunch of them and still have mine in the attic. But alas your probably like me and by the time I actually purchased one for myself the overclocking abilities were much less than the original ones which went from 300->500Mhz fairly easily. IIRC its because Intel was selling 400 and 450Mhz ones and binning all the good ones into the upper tier bins.
- milesward 7y agoYup, dual 450 celery was my gaaaangster setup at my silly startup :)
- dguaraglia 7y agoHahah, I can relate so much with the 'poorerer' part, I'll raise you another one: my first '686' was a Cyrix 6x86 because those were the cheapest you could get. Eventually got my hands on a Pentium II and had to scavenge parts to replace my setup. Good times. Nowadays I just buy a laptop with everything soldered on it and complain a lot if I have to reboot it every month.
- rconti 7y agoCyrix/Nexgen 5x86/133!
- cptskippy 7y agoIn the late 90s I had a 486sx33 with one of those Cyrix 586 upgrade chips for the math co-processor slot. It was so hot it had a fan on it! Crazy! I also maxed out the RAM to 32mb and upgrade the SRAM in my Trident video card so I could do 256 color in Windows 95. I also had a 40mb Erwin Tape Drive for backing up my 100mb HDD. It wasn't fast but it was faster than reinstalling Tie Fighter from Floppies.
- nonamenoslogan 7y agoMy first was an AMD 286 @ 12MHz, still have it in a cigar box somewhere.
- willvarfar 7y agoStarted with a zx81, graduated to a 286 with a whopping 2MB RAM, which was really really much, but at a time when everyone else was getting 386s.
- Klinky 7y agoThe "math co-processor" chip was actually a full DX33 and your SX33 CPU was disabled. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80487SX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80487SX
- tr352 7y agoCyrixInstead ™ represent!
- therein 7y agoThis comment made me nod my head in agreement, laugh and also experience a wave of nostalgia. All at once.
- bashinator 7y agoI once overclocked one with a pencil. Just connected the solder points between some leads on the CPU package.
- eganist 7y agoSeems to have been a fairly common trick with the Durons. I sadly never experienced the rush of trying it mostly because Athlons and PIIIs were all I'd ever played with when the 1ghz chips started coming out, but this was probably what made the Durons so attractive to student hackers. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=840954 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=840954 Tangent: I love that I can pull up forum threads from two decades ago.
- winrid 7y agoI remember when I got my first free 1ghz PIII machine in high school. This was like 2009. Huge difference from my 450mhz PIII machine.
- kubami 7y agoAh! Athlons. My overclocking journey picked up when I built a DIY watercooler out of a bent 5mm cooper sheet (at which thickness you stop calling it "sheet"?) polished to a mirror finish. At some point, during the peak of easter european winter I kept the heat exchanger outside in the -20*C temperatures!
- playworker 7y agoI remember doing this too, it unlocked the multiplier which they locked at the factory by slicing through some metal blocks with a laser. My Duron 600 would run at 800 with a normal cooler & fan, then I added a really loud Delta fan and a copper heatsink and it was stable at a magical 1Ghz. Eventually I got cocky enough to solder a resistor between a certain pin on the motherboard and earth which effectively increased all the voltage settings in the BIOS so I could push enough voltage through it to run at 1.2Ghz - it ran like this for years as my only PC. Good times :)
- zouhair 7y agoI couldn't afford either.
- talonx 7y agoYou meant poorer, I presume. Poorerer might be something in a calculator?
- cosmodisk 7y agoThose were the days when I could give full specs for 20 or so CPUs off top of my head.Good times.
- Tostino 7y agoI was right along with you when I was helping my parents pick out their next PC purchase, a p3 450, and from then on just consumed every single cpu article and review I could find, so much knowledge that I picked up about the computer industry in general has helped me later in my career.
- tzjmetron 7y agoWhich itself was the poorer man's Pentium.
- zentiggr 7y agoWas just helping a relative get their system back up and running after being unplugged for a bit. Celeron 950MHz, 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD, 12x CD-ROM (not DVD :), floppy, add-on IDE Ethernet card. Win XP actually. We have an unused Win8 desktop that we'll be refurbishing and gifting to her soon.
- chapium 7y agoAh the fabled durito.
- cptaj 7y agoHad that same processor on my third computer. Great era to build your own stuff.
- natch 7y agoWondered the same thing! Perhaps "they" (the committee) were afraid that computers were getting powerful enough that we might just find something. Better pull the plug.
- squarefoot 7y agoOr perhaps there's a lot more computing power demand for crypto coin mining that for aliens searching.
- Supernaut 7y agoMy Pentium II home PC identified a candidate signal for them in 2001! Sadly, I have no idea if the galaxy in question is still on their list of leads.
- snapetom 7y agoI worked for a large insurance company, my first job, when SETI@Home was launched. It was a typical large cubicle farm. I remember sneaking around to any unused WindowsNT workstation around me and installing it. Good times, good times.
- crtlaltdel 7y agosame
- hermitdev 7y agoWhen I first got my i7 6-core with quad GTX-690s (2 GPUs per card), I naively let Seti@Home run rampant when the computer was idle. Room they were in got up to around 90F when I let it run 100%. Sad to see they're shutting down.
- schoen 7y agoI suspect in the very early days of cooperative computing, one could genuinely argue that there were "idle cycles" that were going to waste if a computer was powered on and not computing something. But this became more and more inaccurate throughout the 1990s as new power management technologies became a part of computer designs, and is completely wrong now. Phenomena like Bitcoin mining and feeling your laptop get warmer depending on what it's doing show that easily, as does your room-heating experience. I'm still curious about the extent to which the claim of idle compute power going to waste was true when various projects were set up. For example, the press release about the Cooperative Computing Awards (I've forgotten whether this was 1998 or 1999) says > However, the computer industry produces millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time, running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something. https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-offers-cooperative-computing-prizes https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-offers-cooperative-co... The main thing I can think of that would have supported the concept of idle cycles going to waste was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLT_(x86_instruction) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLT_(x86_instruction) > [the CPU-idle instruction] was not specifically designed to reduce power consumption until the release of the Intel DX4 processor in 1994. I participated in DESChall and distributed.net's RC5 challenge and I remember being told, and telling others, that we were only using resources that would otherwise have gone to waste. Were we already greatly mistaken about that in 1997?
- patrickyeon 7y agoI would think of compute resources "going to waste" in three separate groups: - The baseline electricity the computer is using. This will get used and produce no S@H work either way (in an era where our computers didn't go to sleep) - The added electricity to do S@H work. This certainly was not idle, but also was a relatively small amount relative to an entire household's use. - The hardware itself. I would say that S@H were making use of hardware that was "going to waste" (this is CAPEX the project didn't need to spend), was having volunteers donate the added electricity, and could be said to be making use of the baseline electricity inasmuch as it would be used either way, and if S@H were to set up their own compute cluster, they would also incur similar overhead. I don't know what system efficiencies were like in the late 90's, but I would totally believe someone if they said "idle" was 40% the power consumption of "max usage". Using that number as an example, "donated electricity" gets (1/0.6=) 1.6x as much compute-per-watt as if it was donated to run an equivalent, dedicated, machine. Maybe you can convince yourself that you were using "idle cycles" and donating on top of that?
- dntbnmpls 7y agoI ran it before I went to school in the morning and before I went to bed at night for a few days. Then the novelty wore off. Also, it interfered with my downloads. I also remember I watched Contact on tv around that time and it got me hyped about doing my part to discover extraterrestial life.