Almost Like Another Upgrade

Wednesday, February 23, 2005, at 09:24AM

By Eric Richardson

In the course of upgrading the kernel on my desktop (which is also the server for the blog at the moment... sorry if you got a Bad Gateway error while it was down) I took a few minutes to tackle a long-standing suspicion that my machine wasn't running as fast as it should be.

Turns out it really wasn't -- in fact it wasn't even close.

See back in September when I bought new parts and built myself the bulk of a new machine I had a few issues with the motherboard and had to reset the CMOS settings. Somehow that meant I ended up with the frontside bus speed set to 100mhz. The computer then saw my Athlon 3200+ as a 1300mhz CPU. I've now bumped that up to 166mhz (I didn't try 200mhz yet) and the CPU now shows up as a 3000+. I know, it's still not at its full potential, but it's enough of a bump to get almost a 2x speedup in eThreads benchmarks.

I sort of like the idea of a progressive upgrade. Now it's like I just got a new CPU, even though I paid for it back in September.