IBM Power PC 1GHz chip only runs properly at 933MHz

[bhoggett]

Irrespective of any x86 vs PPC argument, I'd regard any product like this to be faulty (not merely flawed) and unfit for distribution unless rebadged as a 933 MHz processor.

[bhoggett]

Some vendors don’t follow Intel’s guidelines, thus the activation of safety feature.

Some vendors are complete morons. They go by the principle that if the CPU comes with a heatsink and fan, that should solve any overheating problems.

Of course, that's stupid. Air cooling depends on proper ventilation - which a lot of basic systems do not have - in the same way that a water cooler requires a radiator or some means of actually cooling the water itself.

[bhoggett]

KennyR wrote:
Not morons, just not following the times.

Vendors who don't follow the times are morons. Why should anyone buy anything from a jackass who doesn't know what he's doing?

Just a few years ago a heatsink and fan was enough for any tower system; just the flow of air caused by the PSU was enough to keep the insides of the case cool enough.

Go back far enough and you didn't even really need a heatsink and fan on your CPU. Then again, the CPU wasn't very capable either.

And I can't say I blame them either: the heat of CPUs is fast reaching the point of the utterly ridiculous. In a few years more will vendors be morons because they don't supply the correct liquid freon coolant to shift 100+ watts of pure wasted heat energy out of the tower?

First of all, a large percentage of the extra heat comes from components other than the CPU. GPUs, motherboards and hard drives all generate more heat now than they used to. They all use more power, so the PSU generates more heat too, not all of which is blown out of the back.

As it happens, the technology for active cooling of CPUs has improved a great deal: bigger and more heat conductive heat sinks, bigger and quieter fans, etc. What this needs is unrestricted airflow in cases, and this is where the vendors cut corners. They like to use smaller cases, so they cram them more, but they don't take care to make sure there are no restrictions to airflow. There is little excuse for not using tubular cables any more, and for not tidying up the cabling in such a way that it does not restrict airflow. All done to squeeze that little bit of extra profit in a cut-throat market.

The PPC line has been the cooler one so far, though since the rest of the components in the case still use more power than old systems the advantage is relative.

I'll grant you heat generation has become silly these days, but the CPU is only one factor in this, as it is only one factor in the noise generation produced by cooling systems.

I won't compare it to your Cyrix because quite honestly none of my software would even run on that CPU any more.

[bhoggett]

Except that most rounded cables are produced by vendors without a single EE on staff, and some actually show a negligible but worrying (as regards integrity) performance hit in practice.

Agreed, but if you're really keen on performance you wouldn't be using ATA drives any more.

Luckily, the SATA/SAS phy rather solves for this anyway.

It does. I just don't see every vendor adopting them wholesale just yet. No doubt that will change fairly soon. as there's no significant cost difference, unlike SCSI.

Or to provide what consumers want, in which case the world might actually have some demand for (non-watercooled) PPCs.

Except that consumers want systems which are useful to them, and for the time being PPC systems are of limited use. With this in mind, I doubt there is a massive consumer demand for PPC systems outside Mac and Amiga circles, and I don't see that changing much any time soon. Even Linux users will get more out of x86 and its 64-bit siblings than they will out of PPC systems.