Posted 05/26/09 at 04:00:28 PM by Paul Lilly

There's a reason Intel's Celeron line has consistently proven popular among overclockers. Out of CPU-Z's top 20 list of highest clocked CPUs, Celeron chips -- most of them of the Celeron 347 variety -- occupy 12 spots, or 60 percent of the list. And recently setting a new record for the No. 2 spot, Belgian overclocker 'Blind' from Madshrimps pushed his Celeron 352 chip (Cedarmill core) to 8.116GHz.

In order to ramp up that high, Blind used the Dragon F1 Extreme Edition LN2 cooler with gum filling the gaps around the socket to prevent condensation. It took nearly 1.9V to coax the Celeron past 8GHz, well above its stock 1.3V rating.

Such high voltages and extreme cooling methods limit the usefulness to chasing overclocking records as opposed to any kind of day-to-day operations, but we'll admit to being impressed at seeing a 3.2GHz  Celeron achieve almost a 5GHz OC. And hey, reaching 5.7GHz on air isn't too shabby either.

Plenty of pics and more info here.

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Posted 03/10/09 at 10:40:34 AM by Paul Lilly

You have to admire when a company doesn't just talk the talk, but walks the walk. EVGA, one of three Nvidia add-in board (AIB) partners to offer lifetime warranties for its videocards, not only allows end-users to overclock their cards without voiding the warranty, but arguably encourages the behavior by serving up OCing tools. Registered owners can download the company's GPU Voltage Tuner utility, and anyone can download EVGA's Precision overclocking software whether they own an EVGA-brand videocard or not.

In the case of the latter, a new version is now available, v1.5.1. Several updates have been added to the 1.5.x refresh (the majority were included in v1.5.0 released last Friday), including multi-GPU support. The overclocking tool now gives users independent access to thermal monitoring, overclocking, and fan control settings of all installed GPUs whether configured to run in SLI or not.

Other changes and fixes  include better support for GeForce 9 and older videocards, a pair of new skins, settings no longer reset at Windows startup on multi-GPU systems, fixed memory clock monitoring for G98 GPUs, and Precision now displays the graphics processor codename in the system info.

Changelog
Download

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Posted 08/13/08 at 11:44:20 AM by Paul Lilly

Overclock.net forum member nitteo claims to have built a Folding@Home farm with no less than 51 GPUs, and he has the pics to prove it. In them are a mixture of 8800GT and 8800GS videocards spread out across a variety of MSI and Gigabyte motherboards. Final numbers are still be tallied, but nitteo estimates he'll pull in over 250,000 points per day on his new setup, and things only look to get better with the CUDA-based folding client.

That's all well and good for Overclock.net (and the Folding community in general), but that also means Team Maximum PC has to keep it kicked up into high gear. Maximum PC currently holds the 4th spot in team rankings and could use your help. If you want to Fold for your favorite magazine, add team 11108 to your client's profile, and drop by the forum for tips on how to optimize your production.

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Posted 07/23/08 at 05:47:32 PM by Paul Lilly

With ATI having finally jumped back into the ring with Nvidia, the two companies have been taking performance jabs at each other in tit-for-tat fashion. One of those jabs came last month as Nvidia tweaked its 9800GTX with a die shrink (65nm to 55nm) and clockspeed boosts culminating in a new card dubbed the 9800GTX+. So does that mean BFG's newly announced 9800GTX+ OC can be considered an overclocked, overclocked 9800GTX? Holy redundancy, Batman!

However you label it, BFG's 9800GTX+ OC ranks as one of the fastest G92-based videocards on the market:

• Core Clockspeed: 760MHz (vs 738MHz)
• Shader Clockspeed:1,890MHz (vs 1,836MHz)
• Memory Clockspeed: 2,250MHz (vs 2,200MHz)

Also supported are the usual assortment of goodies, including PhysX support, 3-way SLI, HybridPower technology, DirectX 10, dual-link HDCP, and a bevy of other marketing bullets. The card also comes backed by BFG's 24-hour tech support and lifetime warranty (be sure to register online within 30 days of purchase).

But for all that it includes, BFG still doesn't allow end-users to overclock its videocard, nor are they trusted to swap out the stock cooler for a third-party solution without voiding the warranty (Boo!), a pair of liberties given to XFX and Evga owners.

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