Question about CPUs. (Warning: A stupid one)

[Xamiche]

Umm, did anyone notice the [color=008000]April Fools[/color] notice on the article concerning the "slowing down" of CPUs over time?

@the guy who's computer benchmarked slower some years later with the same set up. If the heat sink and fan on the CPU or VPU were functioning less effectively, quite likely considering the age, then those chips where mostly likely running hotter and that would result in poorer CPU/VPU performance and therefore a lower benchmark score.

[Xamiche]

Only few chips are actually capable of downclocking when overheated (e.g. Pentium 4). Most simply crash.

It not a matter of downclocking. You still lose performance when it over heats because of errors in calculations, or rather operations, and time spend doing the operation again because of the error. Of course if the chip continues to over heat, it will eventually crash. Don't just take my word for it, try it. Take a working Pentium system, run a first person shooter with a frames per second read-out and then slow the CPU fan down. Watch the frames per second drop. We did this in our microprocessor fundamentals unit. I say use a Pentium chip because it more resilient to heat than an AMD chip. It will survive where an AMD will most likely fry.

[Xamiche]

Enough, I don't want anymore forum wars. I can go to the Archlord forums for that. I know what we observed. When we slow the fans the programs performance degraded.

I never said a CPU can get slower with age. I never said P4 don't down clock. My post is a response to someone who wondered why they benchmarked lower with the same system several years apart. Our trial may cast some light on why.