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The ideal pc
IG-88:
OK. better and better. I updated my wish list and I'm at $375. Very nice.
I'm a little nervous about overclocking. I've read a little and heard alot about it but never really tried it. Feel like walking a guy through it? I'd hate to fry the CPU or something.
I will also read your post you mentioned earlier. I was gonna print it but it's like 170 pages or some damn thing. How much more improvement will I get with a "stock" cpu vs. an "overclocked" one? I mean really, it's only for my beer drinking buds and all. If were only talking a few percentage points is it worth the effort? Or are we talking a marked improvement here?
taz-nz:
--- Quote from: IG-88 on April 18, 2009, 09:44:38 pm ---OK. better and better. I updated my wish list and I'm at $375. Very nice.
I'm a little nervous about overclocking. I've read a little and heard alot about it but never really tried it. Feel like walking a guy through it? I'd hate to fry the CPU or something.
I will also read your post you mentioned earlier. I was gonna print it but it's like 170 pages or some damn thing. How much more improvement will I get with a "stock" cpu vs. an "overclocked" one? I mean really, it's only for my beer drinking buds and all. If were only talking a few percentage points is it worth the effort? Or are we talking a marked improvement here?
--- End quote ---
Overclocking is not as scary as it seems, shoot me a PM before you buy and I see what I can do to help.
Yeah, that thread took on a life of it's own, but there is a lot of useful info in there for those trying to get the most out of MAME.
MAME preformance scales linearly with clock speed, overclocking a 3ghz CPU to 4ghz is a 33% gain in clock speed, which in turn result in a 33% gain in MAME preformance, many of the most demanding MAME roms don't become playable until you get a Core2Duo to 4ghz. MAME is the ultimate Ghz whore, it will take all the clock speed you throw at it and still ask for more.
UberCade:
I just recently built a monster PC and I'll do some benchmarking once I get my MAME set updated since there are folks out there asking about performance on a Core i7 system. I'm curious to see how it handles the newer roms as well, since I've never been able to play most of them. My system is as follows:
Intel Core i7 920 OC'ed to 3.8 GHz (stomps a mudhole in the 965, and still have headroom left for 4+ GHz)
ASUS P6T Deluxe
6 gigs of PC12800 RAM @ 1600 MHz
EVGA GeForce GTX 285 (trading up for a 295 in a couple weeks)
2x WD 150 GB VelociRaptors striped
SoundBlaster Xtreme Gamer 7.1
Dual-boot between Windows XP 64-bit and Windows 7 Beta (HUGE improvement over Vista)
Anyhoo as you can see my PC is capable of some monstrous performance numbers, so I'll throw MAME at it once I get updated (it's literally been a few years since I've updated my MAME set :o) and share the results.
FYI overclocking is not hard at all once you get the basic process down. Just stay away from insanely high overvoltages and monitor your temps and you'll be fine.
Blanka:
Thought the TS was not interested in overclocking. Why then talk so much about that?
What is binning BTW?
taz-nz:
--- Quote from: Blanka on April 19, 2009, 05:40:55 am ---Thought the TS was not interested in overclocking. Why then talk so much about that?
What is binning BTW?
--- End quote ---
Binning is a testing and selection process done on CPU during manufacture. Basically once all CPU dies have been etched in a silcon wafer, each die is tested, defective dies are marked and dumped when the wafer is cut in individual dies.
Now because the etching process is not purfect there are tiny difference in all the dies, when the dies are test some will be stable at high clock speeds, some will need less power, and some will produce less heat, the dies which come out best accross the board will end up in a bin together, lesser groups of dies will end up in other bins, thus the name binning.
The CPU dies with the best binning end up as the top of the range models like the E7500 where lower binned dies end up as models like the E7200. It goes further where some dies will have defect in area like the cache memory, so that part of the cache is disable and those dies go on to be models like the E5300 as the rest of the die still works perfectly.
The distribution of good, average and bad dies, follows a bell shaped curve, so you only a small numder of the dies on a silcon wafer will be good enough to be the top models, this is why chips like the E8600 cost so much more than the E8400 as there are only a limited number of dies that come up to spec for those models. CPU stepping changes are small changes in the manufacturing process or die design that result in more dies meeting the top binning standards, thus they can make faster models of the same CPU or lower the cost of the expensive models as they have more of them to go around.
The AMD Phenom II X3 is a great expample of binning, they start out as X4 dies, but because the fail to meet some requirement during binning, AMD dissables one core on the die and they become X3s instead of X4s, this is why it's possible to hack most Phenom II X3s back into an X4s as they are the same chip just with different binning. The same is true of GPUs, back in the day I hacked my Radeon X800 Pro into a X800 XT Platium Edition.
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