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posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 19 2022, @05:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the vroooooom dept.

Intel's lowly Celeron G6900 CPU gets overclocked to a staggering 5.3GHz:

Intel's lowly Celeron G6900 processor can be pepped up massively, an expert overclocker has shown us, pushing the Alder Lake chip to a rather staggering 57% above its default clock speed.

This feat was achieved by Der8auer, a well-known German overclocker who has set many previous records when juicing up chips, and managed to get the G6900 CPU to hit 5,338MHz (up from the default base clock speed of 3.4GHz).

What's even more interesting here, aside from a low-end chip blazing away at over 5.3GHz, is that of course this is a non-K processor – only Intel's 'K' model CPUs are officially able to be overclocked. However, with Alder Lake, other models can be ramped up, at least if they're running on a Z690 (high-end) motherboard, using the BCLK unlock capability in the BIOS (BCLK meaning base clock).

Recently Der8auer has also demonstrated overclocking other Alder Lake non-K processors including Intel's Core i5-12400, with seriously impressive results (reaching 5,240MHz across all cores). Plus in this new video, he shows the Intel Core i3-12100 hitting 5,400MHz – about 26% faster than its rated boost.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 19 2022, @05:44AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday January 19 2022, @05:44AM (#1213787) Journal

    The Celeron G6900 [intel.com] is a 2-core, 2-thread CPU, paired with Z690 which is going to be over $200.

    It is a neater trick for the Core i5-12400, although Intel might try to disable this with BIOS updates like they did with AVX-512 support [tomshardware.com].

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    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @07:39AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @07:39AM (#1213799)

    First with the Microsoft propaganda, then the Intel. Is this a coordinated attack, or just random front page selections?

    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday January 19 2022, @07:59AM (4 children)

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 19 2022, @07:59AM (#1213803) Journal

      Have you a list of companies that you deem to be acceptable? We try to publish a reasonable mix of stories taken from the submission queue - if this is what the community wants to read then this is probably what we should put on the front page.

      Alternatively, have you tried making a submission recently on a topic that interests YOU?

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @08:30AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @08:30AM (#1213806)

        Different AC here. As someone who enjoyed the tech news stories that used to be commonplace on Slashdot, these stories seem similar to what would have been posted on old school Slashdot. As such, I appreciate these stories. I strongly disagree with the OP and I am glad that these stories were posted to SN. Please consider this a bit of positive feedback about the recent stories.

        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday January 19 2022, @08:53AM (1 child)

          by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 19 2022, @08:53AM (#1213810) Journal

          Thank you. Any response goes a long way round here - and a positive response goes that bit further! I'll make sure that all of the eds are aware of your comment.

          • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @01:36PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @01:36PM (#1213834)

            Different-different AC here. I'm sure you all are aware that it is far easier to bitch and complain than it is to give praise, so don't take the number of complaints to be proportional to reality. The good work you all do is certainly appreciated.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by deimtee on Wednesday January 19 2022, @11:01AM

        by deimtee (3272) on Wednesday January 19 2022, @11:01AM (#1213819) Journal

        I'd have to agree with the sibling AC who likes tech stories. Just because they don't get as many comments doesn't mean there is no interest in tech. I read most of the tech stories, (and even their FA's). I just don't comment unless I have something substantive to say about them.

        Political stories might get the most comments, but it's mostly just repetitive partisan bullshit. "D good, R bad" , "No!! R good, D bad." Blah blah blah.

        --
        If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Wednesday January 19 2022, @08:51AM (8 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Wednesday January 19 2022, @08:51AM (#1213808) Homepage Journal

    TFA doesn't mention cooling, and I'm not interested enough to watch the video. However, it's a fair bet that you can't just overclock the beast - likely he's using liquid nitrogen or some other exotic form of cooling to keep the chip from melting itself.

    Extreme overclocking is a neat trick, but it is completely irrelevant for normal users. Also completely irrelevant to the question of comparative performance with AMD.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday January 19 2022, @09:39AM (7 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday January 19 2022, @09:39AM (#1213814) Journal

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo9o1RZQtI0 [youtube.com]

      Nope. Water cooler and new thermal paste. I think the cooler is this one [amazon.com], at around $90.

      If you stop and think about it, 5.3 GHz is not really an extreme clock speed anymore. The i9-12900H mobile CPU will turbo itself up to 5.0 GHz. Most CPUs are not hitting 5.3 GHz out of the box, but it can be reached. The G6900 is "locked" at 3.4 GHz with no turbo, but as long as this method works, it can be pushed much higher.

      The real relevancy question is about the motherboards, and according to an update on the video, there may be some cheaper B660 motherboards that support this method of overclocking.

      Quick update regarding Mainboards: I found two B660 Boards which should technically allow non-K OC. Ordered both and should have an update within the next 2-3 days :)

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @01:43PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @01:43PM (#1213835)

        I wanted to ask a related question, which is, what is the purpose of overclocking, especially these days where CPUs aren't advertised mainly on the numbers of GHz? Is CPU performance any kind of practical limitation for 95% of the people out there? I understand the "because it's there" argument, which is fine, but is there any reason I would want to take apart my computer to add external cooling systems other than to say I can do it?

        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @02:58PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @02:58PM (#1213849)

          It's not as important as it used to be. It's not that clock speed doesn't matter, as much as that the manufacturers are leaving very little on the table. A decade ago you could get a CPU rated at 3 GHz and run it all the way up to the mid 5s. Now that CPU comes rated at 5GHz but has pretty much the same maximum speed. On top of that, water cooling used to be a big effort and now it's completely mainstream, to the point where the high end CPUs basically demand it. Which, in turn, lets the manufacturers claim speeds that would have previously only been available to overclockers.

          Overclockers have not really developed any technology that is better than water but practical enough to be useful for anything other than record setting attempts. Part of the problem is that anything with below room temperature parts creates condensation, and that's a surprisingly obnoxious problem. I experimented with oil bath cooling and it "works" but it is never going to be mainstream. And nobody wants what amounts to a noisy refrigerator running next to their computer. Room temperature water cooling is pretty much the quietest possible cooling system besides passive air, it's not that expensive, and it's good enough to get 90% of the performance of more exotic systems. It's the real sweet spot. The only problem was people's fear of leaks. But that was a psychological hurdle, not a technical problem.

          We might be coming to the end of overclocking being a useful thing for enthusiasts to do.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Wednesday January 19 2022, @04:31PM

          by mhajicek (51) on Wednesday January 19 2022, @04:31PM (#1213868)

          Not sure about other fields, but in CNC programming, overclocking is not uncommon. Toolpath algorithms run on the CPU, rather than the GPU, and may take several minutes to generate in certain cases. Toolpath simulation makes better use of the GPU, but is still CPU intensive. Shop rate can be $100 to $300 per hour, maybe more, so every minute saved helps.

          --
          The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday January 19 2022, @06:12PM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday January 19 2022, @06:12PM (#1213892) Journal

          You got some good answers. I'll say that as long as this works, these budget dual/quad/6-core CPUs become that much more attractive and they were already grabbing plenty of attention (the 6-core i5-12400 in particular). A simple 33% overclock would get the G6900 to 4.5 GHz. This is something that could actually be felt, improving its single-thread performance to beat a lot of older stuff, and improving the bad multi-thread performance (because it's only 2-core, 2-thread).

          I think you are better off not overclocking most CPUs to cut down on power and heat. The 65W desktop APUs from AMD are more than enough performance for most people. On the other hand, if you have a Raspberry Pi 4 with a decent heatsink on it, you want to overclock that by at least 33% to 2 GHz. Because it is slow at any clock speed, and the stock clock speed is meant to enable the worst thermal situation (plastic case).

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @02:32PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @02:32PM (#1213840)

        5.3GHz hasn't been extreme for a long time. People were getting that with Sandy Bridge ten years ago using plain old room temperature water. Mine (I'm still using it) does 5GHz on air. CPUs were so stagnant in the last decade that it wasn't until Zen 2 or Intel 10th gen that anything really better was even available.

        10GHz is near the theoretical limit for silicon, and the world record (for frequency, not performance) is about 8.8GHz, using liquid nitrogen. Not sure what is special about the AMD Bulldozer that lets it clock so high, but it does. It's not even a good CPU otherwise.

        As for why, overclockers mostly do it because they can. It's interesting to see what the chips are actually capable of. Overclocking a low end part (not really even entry level, these are mostly for embedded systems) with a high end motherboard isn't very useful, but neither is liquid nitrogen. Even if you have a cheap motherboard, who even wants a dual core CPU? But it tells us something about the low end Core CPUs as well. The Celerons are the bottom binned CPU, anything they can do, better CPUs should be able to do too.

        Back before multi core was a thing, overclocking Celerons was the thing to do if you wanted to save a few dollars.

      • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday January 19 2022, @06:38PM (1 child)

        by Freeman (732) on Wednesday January 19 2022, @06:38PM (#1213898) Journal

        Linus Techtips just did a bit where they cooled a cpu with an air conditioner. I.E. hacked Air Conditioner, with coolant going to the CPU and super cooling. I.E. -20 Celsius / -4 Fahrenheit.

        I would say hooking up a water cooler and using special thermal paste on a dual-core CPU would be about as reasonable as that.

        --
        Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 19 2022, @07:11PM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday January 19 2022, @07:11PM (#1213903) Journal

          I would say hooking up a water cooler and using special thermal paste on a dual-core CPU would be about as reasonable as that.

          It's not special or difficult [pcworld.com] at all.

          Plus you could just use an air cooler, overclock it something like 33% to 4.5 GHz, and call it a day. The end result is a gigantic performance improvement for these non-K CPUs.

          --
          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 22 2022, @05:14AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday January 22 2022, @05:14AM (#1214713) Journal
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