June 2006 Archives

   Despite not liking to go into my B&W for fears of my foul touch killing it, I went ahead anyway and bit-the-bullet. It took less than 10 minutes but it felt like an eternity as I painstakingly made sure the new heatsink was on the chip correctly.
   Why it felt like it took so long is becuase, unlike previous G3s, the 750gx's core is physically smaller and it doesn't have any type of shim in place. Thus, the heatsink is resting solely on the processor core.
   After taking it through the standard tests, plus an hour of more of straight Seti@home, I have come to believe that all is well. In fact, I've already taken the chip to 1.2GHz in the hope that the more efficient cooling will help it to cope with it.
   Also, I reseated the card adapter thingie in my PC and it is purring along happily as I speak.

   Today I finally received the 1u Socket 370/A heatsink that I've been waiting on (actually a day early). I'm hoping to somehow get it on top of my B&W G3's 750gx. I've been busy trying to bend a heatsink clip to allow it to fit on there.
   I was actually going to put the newly arrived heatsink onto my Gaming PC's Tualatin but it wouldn't have fit thanks to a chipset heatsink that I put on there. So, I decided to use it on my G3.
   Sadly, I think that the RAMsinks that I have on my video card may get in the way. In that case, I will most likely be using the heatsink that I have in my Gamin PC. It is a smaller, width-wise, one and should fit without problems.
   The not-too-sad news is that my Gaming PC is out of commission for the moment. I think it is becuase I had to remove the CPU and it has some problems when I do that. I believe it has to do with the retaining clip things. I'll get it back up and running soon, though. It has done it before anyway...

   I've been working on a database manager for my OS 9 server lately. I decided that it would be nice to have one close at hand.
   Basically, it's going to handle inputing and outputing data from databases via simple html forms. The databases are not going to be anything complex, but they may get rather large.
   I've just been getting the structure traced out, up until now. I'm hoping to have it done before the week is over.
   Strangely enough, I'm scripting this cgi in Applescript. Applescript does have its plusses and minuses, but its not really made for such work. Nevertheless, it's rather fun getting it to do so.
   More later...

   It has always been necessary for me to try to push my computers as far as their hardware will go. This usually starts off with trying to overclock the processor for me. There are usually two methods for doing this: overclocking the frontside bus, or upping the processor's multiplier.
   Firstly, increasing the speed of the frontside bus does generate better performance sometimes because it overclocks other components on the motherboard and not just the CPU. Of course, these other components might not react well to the overclock and might stymie one's efforts. Sadly, I've not heard good reports from overclocking the bus on a B&W G3, probably due to the Grackle chip.
   The only method left that I could use is upping the processors's multiplier to just increase its clock frequency. The chip I have in there now is only rated at 1GHz but runs fine at 1.1Ghz. 10% is a nice and modest overclock, it's not enough for me.
   That is why I intend to push my lowly G3 to 1.2GHz. The reason behind why I believe it will take the relatively small jump to 1.2GHz is that it seems to run fine for a while at this frequency. I've come to the conclusion that the heatsink that came with the B&W may be quite inadequate to handle the heat output of an overclocked 750gx. It does put out more heat than previous G3s.
   With this knowledge, I'm hoping to get a hold of a 1U socket A or 370 heatsink that will fit in the B&W's case. Until then...

   I've made some changes in the 'Fan' section, which can be accessed on the rightside of this page. To be more specific, I added a page for my Powerbase and updated the page on my B&W G3.