Revisiting an old argument; does HyperThreading hurt performance?

Subject: General Tech | April 26, 2012 - 11:48 AM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: hyperthreading, Intel, overclocking, fud

In the past there have been two arguments against using Intel's HyperThreading to create two threads per core.  The first is specific to overclockers who found that previous generations of Pentium and Core architecture chips could remain stable when pushed to higher frequencies when they disabled HyperThreading.  There is still a lot of testing to be done on Ivy Bridge overclocking before a definitive answer is found for this generation of chips, which may fall victim to power issues before HyperThreading becomes a major limiter.

The second issue is more serious and deals with the fact that in some cases enabling HyperThreading reduces the total performance of the chip on certain, usually single threaded, applications and by disabling it you will see performance improvements from your processor.  SemiAccurate felt that this needed to be revisited in light of the release of Ivy Bridge and so took an i7-3770K through a battery of 7 tests once with HyperThreading enabled and once without, including a run through CineBench with multithreaded processing disabled.  Drop by to see if there is any noticeable benefit to disabling HyperThreading on this generation of Intel processor.

^{Yes, that was 11 years ago}

"We decided to explore the effects of Hyper-Threading on the performance of the Ivy Bridge based Core i7-3770K by running our CPU benchmarking suite on it twice. Once with Hyper-Threading enabled, and once with Hyper-Threading disabled. As such we set-up our results table to look for applications that perform better with Hyper-Threading disabled, rather than enabled."

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk

• Quantum cruncher beats today's computers by 10^80 @ The Register
• SSH firm aims to untangle crypto key hairball @ The Register
• TSMC profits fall by 8.4 per cent to $1.1bn @ The Inquirer
• Ivy Bridge overclocking performance is limited by current leakage @ The Inquirer

GoFlow To Offer $99 tDCS Brain Augmentation Kit

Subject: General Tech | March 12, 2012 - 09:54 PM | Tim Verry
Tagged: tDCS, overclocking, DIY, brain, augmentation

The new Extreme Tech (RIP ET Classic) recently ran an article that talks about turbo boosting, overclocking goodness, but with a twist. Instead of the typical CPU or GPU hardware, the article talks about overclocking some wetware in the form of the human brain. More specifically, a DIY kit called the GoFlow is in the works to enable affordable tDCS, or transcranial direct-current stimulation, to stimulate the brain into a "state of flow" enabling quicker learning and faster response times.

The GoFlow β1 will be a $99 do it yourself tDCS kit that will direct you in placing electrodes on the appropriate areas of your scalp and then pumping some direct current from a 9V battery at 2 milliamps through your brain, enticing the neurons into a state of flow. This makes them more malleable to creating new pathways and increasing learning speed as well as allowing them to fire more rapidly, bolstering thought processes. The kit, which is not available for purchase yet, will not require any knowledge of soldering, and will be housed a plastic case along with wires, schematics, and a potentiometer to dial in the right amount of power.

The company behind the GoFlow β1 has further referenced cases of successful tDCS short term testing including tests of UAV Drone pilots and professional gamers all learning their respective trades more quickly than the average. Extremetech also mentions that tDCS can have therapeutic effects for people effected by Parkinson’s or post stoke motor dysfunction.

Right now, the kit is still in the works, but interested users can sign up to be notified when it becomes available on their website. At $99, is this something work a shot, or do you prefer not to void the warranty on your brain? (heh)  Personally, statements such as "our tDCS kit is the shit" and "get one of the first β1's and will help us develop β2" on the webstie are not exactly instilling confidence to me, but if you're big into the early adopter adventure, GoFlow may have something for you to test.

Feast your eyes on four overclocked HD7970s crushing benchmarks

Subject: Graphics Cards | February 28, 2012 - 02:28 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: quad crossfire, hd7970, amd, overclocking

It would be quite the feat to find a case to contain the system below, with four HD7970s powered by two 1200W PSUs plus other assorted components, not to mention the heat this system will produce.  Not even the ASUS MARS 2 in SLI can keep up with this monstrosity and the scaling from a pair of HD7970s is rather impressive as in the past adding the third and fourth card did not lead to large gains.  The Core i7-3960X @ 4.8GHz simply can't keep up with the GPUs, implying that this system could actually be more impressive.  If you want to see $2200+ of GPUs in action then head to OC3D.

"In combination with ASUS we're rerunning our Quadfire HD7970 test with the benefit of overclocking. Roll up, roll up."

Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:

Graphics Cards

• Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 1GB OC Video Cards in CrossFire @ Tweaktown
• XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black Edition S Super Overclocked 1GB @ Tweaktown
• XFX HD7770 Black Edition S Crossfire & HD7750 DD @ Tweaktown
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 3072MB @ Techspot
• Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Cards in CrossFire Overclocked @ Tweaktown
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 OC WindForce @ Guru of 3D
• Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC @ [H]ard|OCP
• XFX Radeon HD 7970 Black Edition Review @ Neoseeker
• Quiet Hit: HIS Radeon HD 6930 IceQ X 1 GB @ X-bit Labs
• XFX Radeon HD 7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition DD Video Card Review @ Madshrimps

500 people attend AMD [H]ardOCP FX GamExperience 2012

Subject: Graphics Cards, Processors, Shows and Expos | January 22, 2012 - 01:09 AM | Steve Grever
Tagged: overclocking, hardocp, ati, amd, 7970

More than 500 people made the trip to Eddie Deen’s Ranch in Dallas, Texas to attend AMD and HardOCP’s FX Game Experience event today. Many of the tech industry’s heavy hitters were on hand with interactive booths to showcase their latest PC hardware and provide people with around $50,000 in giveaways and prizes. 

Check out our video coverage of the AMD [H]ardOCP FX GamExperience 2012 event!

ASUS, MSI, and Sapphire each brought their latest respective AMD-based motherboards and performance graphics cards to showcase at the event, including their HD Radeon 7950 and 7970 offerings. ASUS also gave the audience a closer look at some of their other PC gaming peripherals, wireless routers, and Blu ray burners.

HardOCP founder Kyle Bennett put on a show for the crowd with numerous raffle drawings and crazy contests for people to win new AMD processors and other hardware from MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, Corsair, Ergotech, Antec, Maingear, Optoma, Patriot Memory, Astro, Sapphire, Western Digital, ArcSoft, ASRock, vReveal, Diamond Multimedia, and Zotac. 

Check out all of our coverage of the AMD [H]ardOCP FX GamExperience 2012!!

Intel Launching Pilot Overclocking Protection Plan

Subject: Processors | January 19, 2012 - 02:08 PM | Tim Verry
Tagged: tuning plan, processors, overvolting, overclocking, cpu

Intel relatively recently started producing unlocked "K" series processors that enabled easy overclocking by way of increasing the multiplier. This is a feature that was traditionally reserved for the thousand dollar Extreme Edition products. AMD then followed suit with its own line of "K" series APUs (despite having FX and Black Edition branding already, but that's another story). Well, it is now Intel's turn to leap frog AMD who has traditionally been the overclocker friendly company. Yesterday Intel launched a new pilot program that overclockers and enthusiasts are sure to enjoy. The new Performance Tuning Protection Plan is a program aimed at users of "K" and "X" (unlocked and extreme edition) processors who are adventurous enough to overclock and overvolt their chips to wrangle the best possible performance from them. While the company has stressed that they still do not officially endorse overclocking or otherwise running their CPUs out of Intel specifications, the Performance Tuning Protection Plan is an additional service that can be added in addition to (though seperate from) the existing warranty wherein Intel will furnish a free replacement processor to any users that (unintentionally) damage their processors as a result of overclocking or increasing the voltage. Read on for more details.

The new Performance Tuning Protection Plan will be offered directly from Intel as well as various resellers and can be purchased for any of Intel's K series, X series, or Socket 2011 processors. Only one plan can be applied per processor, and once the CPU has been replaced with a replacement processor through the plan, the insurance does not "roll over" to the replacement part. This means that a second chance is all you get. If the replacement CPU fails as a result of overclocking or overvolting you're out of luck. The Protection Plan is further an additional expense that will applied in addition to the standard 3 year manufacturer's warranty. It only covers damage caused by running the processor out of spec. After purchasing the processor, users can buy the protection plan for a one time fee, and it will kick in within approximately 30 days of buying the plan. Intel says the delay is caused by the time needed for the various plan supporting databases to sync up and for payment to clear.

Prices vary depending on which processor you want to protect with the plan. The Performance Tuning Protection Plan pricing for currently supported processors is listed in the chart below.

Intel is currently offering the new overclocking insurance for a limited time-- a six month trial run to be more specific. Starting January 18th, the company will begin selling the plan directly to customers on their website as well as through several resellers. Initially these resellers include CyberPower, Canada Computers and Electronics, Scan Computers, and Altech Computers. On February 13th, Intel will add additional resellers to the list. The pilot phase will last for six months; after which the company will "decide whether or not to proceed" with the plan. Obviously there is a slight risk for early adopters that after buying the plan, Intel will discontinue it at the six month mark; however, there is also a solid opportunity to overclock the heck out of the chips and have an official safety net for the next few months at the least. Are you running an unlocked processor, and if so will you be checking out the Tuning Protection Plan?

Check out the speeds on this air cooled HD7970

Subject: Graphics Cards | January 16, 2012 - 06:11 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: trixx, sapphire, overclocking, hd7970

The HD 7970 is nice but not nice enough for Kyle and the gang over at [H]ard|OCP who started overclocking the card as soon as they polished off the review at default settings.  If they were hoping for a challenge, the card was a bit of a disappointment as they cranked the overdrive frequencies to their maximums of 1125MHz GPU and 1575MHz RAM only to find that the card remained 100% stable.  Discouraged but not defeated, they reached out to Sapphire for a custom version of the TRIXX Utility, which allows more control over voltages as well as significantly higher clock speeds.  The resulting tests pegged the card at 1.26GHz GPU and 1725MHz for the memory, not too shabby for air cooling!

"We overclock the Radeon HD 7970 in Overdrive and show you what 1.125GHz of performance looks like. Then, we go to the edge and overclock the voltage and take this GPU past 1.2GHz for stellar overclocked gaming performance. We compare this to an overclocked GeForce GTX 580 and see how performance stacks up."

Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:

Graphics Cards

• Sapphire Radeon 7970 Quad-CrossFire First Look Performance @ HardwareHeaven
• AMD Radeon HD7970 versus NVIDIA GeForce GTX460 SLI @ NitroWare
• HIS HD 7970 3GB Overclocked @ Tweaktown
• Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Vapor-X OC 1GB Graphics Card Review @ eTeknix
• Sapphire Radeon HD6450 Flex Edition Video Card Review @ TechwareLabs
• Radeon Gallium3D With Mesa 8.0: Goes Up & Down @ Phoronix
• Arctic cooling Accelero Xtreme Plus II @ Hardwareoverclock
• Inno3D GTX560Ti 448 Core @ OC3D

... and the winner is Shamino with a world record 3DMark11 score on an HD7970

Subject: Graphics Cards | January 4, 2012 - 05:47 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: ROG, overclocking, LN2, HD 7970, asus, amd

ASUS' Republic of Gamers is off to an incredible start this year with the release of the HD7970, though there are always those who cannot leave their GPUs at reference speeds.  For instance Shamino, who is not just a ranger in the Ultima series, but is also now the ultimate champion of extreme GPU overclocking.  Taking a brand new HD 7970, removing the stock cooling and replacing it with LN2 cooling has netted him the record for single GPU performance.  He scored 15,063 on 3DMark11 and 54,725 on 3DMark Vantage with an 84% overclock, the GPU was running at 1700MHz when he hit the record.

It can certainly be hard to get into a game when you need to constantly replace the evapourating LN2 cooling the GPU but for overclocking purposes you simply cannot beat the cooling ability of LN2.  His record may not stand for long, they never do in OCing competiton, but for now he is king of the ring and is looking to move onto bigger and better things ... in this case a quad-CrossFire system which he intends to use to take the grand title of fastest graphics performance on the planet.