overclocking

Intel wants to give overclockers some peace of mind with its new Performance Tuning Protection Plan.

PC performance enthusiasts will know that Intel has always taken a hands-off approach toward overclocking. Among other reasons, by advising its customers to ramp the speed of its CPUs beyond their shipped settings, Intel would invite liability if the overclocking resulted in damage to the system or its components.

Instead, Intel has taken a more passive approach to overclocking. By shipping its "K" series CPUs, for example, with unlocked clock speed and memory bus settings, advanced users and boutique PC vendors are … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The case might look more like a piece of HVAC equipment than a gaming desktop, but if it really can hit 5.7GHz with its new cooling system, Origin will be able to offer its customers frankly ridiculous CPU performance.

"Origin PC's exclusive Phase Change Technology...cools the processor to subzero temperatures as low as -40 degrees Celsius," says the company's press release. Origin will offer the cooler as an option in its high-end gaming desktops.

There's always a certain amount of hype that comes with press releases from boutique PC vendors. We've also had our share of difficulty testing even sub-5.0GHz overclocks recently. In fairness, the stability issues that plagued the recent Intel X79 motherboard-based PCs we tested were more to do with prerelease BIOS software than CPU overclocking. Just be aware that specific clock speed claims can be risky due to the variability in CPU silicon.… Read more

"Right now we're the only vendor with a review up because our system got through your testing and another three weeks of use as a comparison system. But we're the ones with the 'unstable' scarlet letter on the review as well."

Update: Since this post went live, Falcon Northwest resubmitted a Mach V with full production-level hardware and BIOS software. It has showed no signs of instability after enduring another set of performance and stability tests and idling for three days. Accordingly, I have removed the editor's note the review.

That's what Kelt Reeves, … Read more

All the excitement these days may be centered around supersmall laptops, from ultraportable to ultrathin to ultrabook, but there's still a place for PCs on the opposite end of the spectrum. There are few things more fun for a laptop reviewer than unpacking and setting up a massive 17- or 18-inch desktop replacement laptop. To be fair, many of these systems hardly qualify to be called laptops at all; some are so massive, and have such poor battery life, that you'll essentially set them up once and never move them again.

We've had a bit of a … Read more

The Origin EON17-S is typical of a boutique gaming laptop. It takes the very latest high-end parts and stuffs them into a slightly customized version of a Clevo 17-inch laptop chassis (Clevo is a Taiwanese manufacturer that makes generic laptops other computer companies tweak and rebrand as their own). What you end up with is a powerful system, hand-assembled and tested, but without the inventive proprietary industrial designs companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell can bring to their own gaming systems.

The real advantage Origin brings is its ability to offer not only overclocked CPUs (not something you'd typically … Read more

The stock Palm Pre has an adequate but ho-hum 500MHz processor inside with 256MB or RAM. And even the Palm Pre Plus simply doubles the RAM. So how would the Pre run with a much faster processor? Now we know.

One modder overclocked his Pre (1.3.5.1 software) from 500MHz to 800MHz. He lost a good deal of battery life. And the phone persistently ran warm. Chances are the phone may one day get so hot it melts his Hanes to his hip.

But hey, marginally faster performance. You can't beat that. If you're interested, download … Read more

Dear PC Industry:

During the past two weeks we've tested three desktops with ambitiously overclocked Intel Core i7 920 chips. Two of those have failed Prime95, a publicly available benchmark designed to test CPU stability. One desktop last week blue-screened within two minutes of a Prime95 run. This afternoon, a PC that came overclocked to 3.73GHz throttled down to 2.4GHz (below the 2.66GHz stock speed for the 920 chip) after about 10 minutes.

We've seen the Core i7 920 chip overclocked successfully. A chip bumped up to 3.88GHz in a system from AVADirect passed … Read more

Remember the days of the humble 486 PC? They all had a few things in common, such as being beige, being enormous, and having a button labelled "turbo." Those days are back, thanks to the MSI Turbobook GX600--the first laptop we can remember to sport a turbo button.

First impressions aren't great, aesthetically at least. OK, it's not beige, but it is all "gamey," which means it's festooned with unnecessary bling that would only appeal to 14-year-old kids. What's with the pointless red vents at the top right and left of the … Read more

Computer cooling technologies are serious business--and for good reason--but it still seemed a bit odd at first that one such device would be created as a limited edition. Yet that's the distinction Asus has bestowed upon its "Triton 79 AMAzing" cooler. (The uppercase is correct, by the way, in case anyone was wondering if our caps-lock key was stuck.)

Aimed at gamers and others fond of overclocking their systems, each one of these 3,200 coolers comes with "an ultra-exclusive identification card marked with a limited-edition serial number," according to Fareastgizmos. And here we … Read more