I Have Assumed Control

4:30 hits, and it's time to stop playing Neverwinter Nights because I'm too far from the end to finish it before sunrise, and if I go much further I won't be able to stop. So I exercise what passes for self-control in my life and actually get the game turned off, and now it's time to think of something else to do.

Maybe I'll just think. God knows I can't do much else, my right arm is numb from winging the mouse around in my latest MegaMalyMarathon, and I think I may be stuck in a state of permanent recline here, at least until somebody comes upstairs and pushes my chair forward. Sounds like a good time for some intellectual gymnastics.

My new system is humming along sweetly. Amazingly quiet. I rebuilt my Duron system in another case, and my god, the screaming of it's cpu fan drowns out all the fans in my system, from across the room. Can't believe I put up with that for almost two years. Good fan, kept things nice and cool - it's an FAB32, I think, could be wrong though - but damn, if you don't like noise, this ain't for you.

It's a P4 2.4b, very nice chip, parked on an Asus P4PE, very nice motherboard. Quick, too, much quicker than my Duron, although the addition of a Radeon and an asston of Crucial ram probably has something to do with that. But the thing about a new system's quickness is that it wears off. This thing seemed faster than my last girlfriend when I first fired it up; now, it's still awfully fast, but the thrill is gone. I need more. Not really a need, I suppose, but I tend to use "need" and "want" interchangeably, as circumstances dictate.

Anyway, what comes to mind is overclocking. You want to put some thrill back into your hardware, overclock it. Not only does it make things faster, but it also puts it at risk, sometimes very great risk, so there's that level of excitement about it as well. How much voltage is safe? How far can I push this thing? Am I going to fry my chip? Am I going to burn it out? And speaking of burning, am I going to start a fire and burn the god-damned house to the ground? These are things that all overclockers must think about. You're looking over the edge, baby, and do you want to take that plunge?

Lot of my friends (well, maybe not a lot, maybe just the two or three who know what overclocking is) think it's a dumb idea, especially these days when processors are so fast anyway. You've got 2.4 ghz, they say, and isn't that fast enough? Why risk it for a statistically insignificant performance increase? Which is a reasonable question, really. Is the risk of Sudden Northwood Death Syndrome or god knows what else worth an extra 10 fps in Morrowind?

No, of course not. Doing something like that to your computer so you get 130 fps instead of 120 is ridiculous at every level. Fortunately, that's not why we do it. Not why I do it, anyway. See, to me, it's a matter of principle. If it can go faster, it should go faster. My system as it sits right now has chewed up and spit out everything I've thrown at it, and that's great, but I know it can run faster than it is, and that means it should be running faster than it is.

Not that there's a point to all this, except that sometimes the obvious risk/reward ratio isn't really the defining factor in a particular course of action. Objectively, overclocking these days is not just risky but also nearly pointless, with minimal performance returns and all sorts of potential headaches. It's a waste of time, effort, and if you're unlucky, money when you have to replace the parts you've burned out. There's absolutely no good reason to do it, and there's no doubt in my mind that it takes a special kind of stupid to even think about doing this sort of thing to your expensive computer hardware.

So I'll let you know how it goes.