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Overclocking and Cooling
Hello,
Intel pulled the plug on its Tejas core last week,
leaving questions to flourish; will the new socket LGA775 Pentium
processor still be released? Why was Tejas canned? Are the road maps we've
been following worth the pixels their printed with?
While I won't claim to have a bug underneath the
4th floor conference table in Intel's Santa Clara offices, I have been
able to gather a little information about the whole CPU-switcheroo. As you
know, Intel had planned on moving from socket 478 Pentium 4 CPUs to a pinless socket 775 Pentium 4 CPU. What you might not have known is that two cores were planned for the new LGA775 package; "Prescott FMB2" and "Tejas FMB1." The latter was dropped, so Intel will still be going ahead with Prescott FMB2 for socket 775, some time around Q1 2005 by all estimates.
According to PCstats sources, the 1066MHz FSB Tejas
core (with 2MB L2 cache!) was cancelled for a couple of reasons; for starters,
in spite of a 0.90 micron manufacturing process, Tejas simply ran too
hot - estimated between 120W-150W! At that wattage, the thermal solution
becomes quite critical... Additionally, with the recent movement by
Intel away from Gigahertz-oriented product marketing, the focus now sits
with CPU performance and power consumption. Thus, a more efficient
dual-core Pentium M processor has been chosen for the desktop platform.
While we're not entirely certain of this, the other rumour was
that Tejas wasn't providing any significant performance advantages
over today's crop of Prescott cores. Add that all up, and you have a
processor core which was too hot, not powerful enough, and conflicting
with Intel's new marketing strategy. Still, with the upcoming Intel
chipset releases, BTX, DDR-2 and
PCI
Express, socket 775 is still on its way. Manufacturers I've spoken with tell me they are expecting socket 775 to bring about some much needed momentum to the entire PC industry. But faced with buying virtually all new computer components - what do you think? Let us know in the PCstats Forums, or shoot me an email.
In this PCstats Newsletter, Colin asks the age old
question - How does
cooling relate to overclocking? - and answers it with the help of some
high tech cooling gear... and -50C
temperatures! Next up is PCstats review of a nice
no-frills i875P motherboard from Albatron, the PX875P
Pro. Following that is the recent guide to stopping
browser hijacking; a serious problem affecting the internet today. Believe
it or not, my home PC was just toasted by a combination of some pesky
browser
hijackers and persistent Adware; so that's actually what inspired this latest guide. :-)
This is an article for overclockers which
explores the age old question;
"How does cooling affect
Overclocking?"
In an enthusiasts attempt to reach higher clock speeds, there
will eventually come a time when the temperature of the processor, memory,
or some other electrical component becomes the limiting factor. This is
commonly known, of course, and is the prime reason why enthusiasts rarely
if ever overclock with the stock heatsink AMD or Intel provide - it's simply not
designed to handle the extra thermal load. Luckily, overclocking has
become so mainstream that it has spawned an entire market to provide it
with the necessary hardware. For the average person looking for a little
more cooling action, the quick solution is to simply buy a more
efficient heatsink, and perhaps a higher CFM fan. Most of the time that is all that
is that's really required. Yet, heatsinks
are not the only method of coaxing a toasty processor into giving up an
extra GHz of speed.... Continue
Here>>
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If you though pop-ups were annoying, just wait
until your web browser is hijacked! In this guide, PCstats shows you how
to regain control and kick out the hijackers, kung-fu
style...
Browser hijacking is one of the web's
constant dangers. Whether it arrives in the form of a flood of obscene
pop-up windows assaulting you after a mistyped URL, or malicious code
taking over your browser completely, chances are good that every Internet
user will be subjected to this practice in some form. Fortunately, avoiding a browser hijacking is not impossible if you stay aware, and take a few simple precautions. Take the metaphor of locking your car doors while you are out for a drive as an
example. If your browser keeps redirecting you to some site. To sum it up, this PCstats Beginners Guide will show you how to avoid and defeat these annoying and potentially embarrassing attacks on your computer, starting with seven preventative measures... Continue
Here>>
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Albatron have accomplished a lot in the relatively
short time that they've been making motherboards and videocards; the
company has good foresight, and that has helped Albatron win over
consumers in an already crowded market. It also helps that Albatron have
taken to producing well equipped mainboards which often feature IDE/Serial
ATA RAID controllers, IEEE 1394 and
even high end audio chipsets as standard. What happens
then to those consumers who don't want fully loaded motherboard? Why
should they spend the extra money for features that aren't really needed?
That brings us to the new Albatron PX875P Pro motherboard, a i875P based
system
that is built for someone who wants all
the performance of the Canterwood chipset, but has no need for any of the
other features. With a competitive price point, this makes it a good
option for paired down office PC's or school computers. Continue
Here>>
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A Reader Asks... |
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Q: I read with interest your article on data recovery. I have much more interest now that I have received the dreaded blue screen and a C0000012 error...Registry File Failure. I spoke to the folks at Dell who said this was an error I could only hope to solve by re-formatting the hard drive and installing XP again. I said, not so fast, since I still have data on the drive that I desperately need. Did I back up? of course not! My thinking is that I should take the drive out and slave it to another XP system. But my question to you is then what can I do? When I tried to re-install XP it said it couldn't read the drive and/or partition. What kind of software can I run from another machine that will enable me to read the damaged partition in the drive and save files?
A: PCstats Hard Drive Data Recovery guide describes several software packages which will do what you are looking for. Since your problem seems to be with the registry and possibly not with the actual drive, it's quite likely that you will not need any special software to read the data off of your problem drive once you install it in a working XP or 2000 system.
A registry issue may prevent XP from
booting, but it should not affect the data on the drive. Try
the transfer and see if you can see the drive on your second
system. You may have to go through Window's Disk management
window to 'activate' the drive, depending on how you had it
configured in your old system. This can be accessed by
right-clicking on 'my computer,' selecting 'manage' then
opening 'disk management.'
If the partition is damaged, or was erased when you tried to reinstall, TestDisk or several other programs will be able to help you. Our hard drive recovery guide contains a detailed how-to for these programs. Next week: How many drives do you want? To submit your questions, send PCstats an email.
| | | -Join us - Beginners Q and A in the PCstats Forums | |
For
today's review, we take a look at Gigabyte's entry into the WIFI 'g' business arena, the GN-A17GU wireless access point. Gigabyte has released several wireless 'g' products recently, and the company is starting to make a name for itself in the business
wireless market. The GN-A17GU can be
considered their first foray into corporate 802.11g products. The
GN-A17GU comes with a decent bundle of equipment, at least for a networking
product (ooh... shiny). Continue
Here>>
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PCstats
Weekly Tech Tips |
Clean up XP | |
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We all know how messy Windows is when it comes to temporary files, but that doesn't mean we can't do something about it. Users of WindowsXP Pro can force the OS to clean up after itself. First click Start, then Run and type in "gpedit.msc", that will open up the Group Policy editor (Note you must have administrative access).
From there follow this path Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Terminal Services -> Temporary Folder. Open up the attributes for the "...Temp Folder Upon Exit" and select disable. After that's done, close the Group Policy editor and from now on when you turn off your PC, Windows will clean out its temporary folders.
Make sure you come down to the PCStats forums today and say hi! Hey, did you cast your vote for PCstats today in the Techlinks? | |
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PCstats Issue
No.134
Circulation: 291,744
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| Industry Insights |
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Intel just unveiled the successor to Banias, the mobile Pentium M responsible for garnering Centrino so much popularity. Whereas its predecessor was manufactured on a 130nm process, Dothan utilizes the same 90nm, strained silicon process as the ill-received Prescott core. This time, however, the smaller lithography is allowing Intel to realize significant gains.
To begin, the new Pentium M includes a full 2MB of on-die L2 cache. SSE and SSE2 support carry over from Banias, as do Advanced Branch Prediction and Intel's SpeedStep technology. Dothan also incorporates an improved data pre-fetch mechanism and an enhanced register access manager for mixed-length reads and writes, all on a 140 million-transistor chip that measures 83 square millimeters.
The fastest Dothan processor, clocked at 2GHz, bears Intel's first model number - Pentium M 755. There are two others as well; the 1.8GHz Pentium M 745 and the 1.7GHz Pentium M 735. All three of those processors run on a 400MHz front side bus. However, Intel will transition to 533MHz, purportedly in the fourth quarter of this year with its Pentium M 770 running at 2.13GHz. A 2GHz Pentium M 760 should emerge at the same time and persist through the first quarter of 2005.
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| Written By |
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Editor-in-Chief
. M. Page
Weekly Tips
. C. Sun
I.I. Columnist
. C. Angelini
A Reader Asks...
. M. Dowler |
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