Overclockix 3.7 Released

prostoalex writes "Overclockix 3.7 is released, available via bittorrent. It's a live Linux CD with a bunch of utilities for 'torturing' the PC hardware, hence the name. The authors seem to take a reasonable approach on graphical desktop, cutting out what they consider unnecessary eye candy, but leaving in the tools essential for effective GUI. 'Some new package highlights such as knoppix firewall, vlc, superkaramba, KDE 3.3.1, newer 2.6.7 kernel, NX client, and many more', the site says."

no distributed.net client?

[rahard]

unfortunately, there's no distributed.net client. :(

does anybody have a bootable CD with dnetc client :)

Cutting out eye candy??

[kidgenius]

Why include KDE then? Why not something lighter like fluxbox, rox, etc?

mmm... Folding

[PaintyThePirate]

I've been using Overclockix for a few months for Folding@Home. It is brilliant in that you can set up a Folding box that needs no HDD, and a keyboard/video/mouse only to configure the Folding client.

Overclocking damage via software, Possible on PCs?

[10000000000000000000]

Do you remember the good old days? When software configuration had the power to wreak physical havoc on the machine components themselves?

ahhh, I recall a coworker telling me the other day about ancient IBM printers.

"Giant beasts!" they were described as. "Stacks of alternating row color feed paper as tall as a MAN!" he said. He was in school and was waiting in line to print out a program he held in his hands as several hundred punch cards. The woman at the front of the line inserted her cards and set the system running.

Apparently she sent some kind of malformatted instruction, because this printer (which was quite substantial in size itself - computers used to be so much more like washing machines and fridges didn't they :) slowly opened it's mechanical lid and began to shoot paper 10 feet out at amazing velocities.

It took some time for an instructor to get called in to stop the madness, and apparently a good amount of paper had been blown through by that point ¦D

anyhow, the point of my story is a question. is it still possible to wreak havoc on modern PC's via non-bios software instructions? theoretically? without any physical hardware modification?

just curious =)

Superkaramba?

[GameGod0]

Superkaramba isn't unncessary eye-candy?

So useful for Windows OC'ers

[roffles]

One of the biggest problems when overclocking is testing stability, and when you're running windows it's hard to tell just what is causing the instability. I think this will be very successful in the OC community because not only will it provide an environment to push the hardware, but it likely won't crash as randomly as windows does, won't require repartitioning to get into linux, and will probably generate more informative error messages if you push things too hard.

Distributed Computing projects.

[Anonymous Coward]

last time I tried overclockix, the distributed computing projects were pre set up to give some other guy 'arkayne' credit.

Skip that.

Apparently yes, but I haven't tested it

[drgonzo59]

A while a ago I went looking for a video ram testing utility. The only one I was able to find was on this page created by this Russian guy at this website [testmem.nm.ru]. (It's mostly in Russian though, which I speak).

There I looked around and found this story [testmem.nm.ru] about this utility called S2KCt used to supposedly cool some athlon processors by using the S2K bus disconnect instruction.

The guy writes how he simultaneously ran his utility that does a cpu burn-in and S2KCt and ended up with a burnt motherboard. He says his "converter" burnt. And he wasn't overclocking the machine at the time. He seems to know enough about heat management since he develops similar programs (see below on that). Then later, he says,using similar hardware he tried to test a later version of S2KCt and his motherboard died again.

So that is what I have recently heard about hardware being damaged by software. Also take note, since the author himself writes utilities that cool and stress the CPU he is not a totally unbiased source.

Any computer engineers who can validate the story ?

Re:no distributed.net client?

[rahard]

Got a floppy drive? You could run it from there. :)

... if only I could find a good floppy disk.
These days, it is more difficult to find a working floppy drive and floppy disk.
It's even more expensive than blank CD!