Any danger in substantially UNDERclocking PCs?

vsp · 02-27-2002, 02:26 PM

Stupid question of the day:

My Athlon 1300 with Win98 SE runs every program I throw at it smoothly -- except one. The exception is a Win95 game that is no longer supported (its manufacturer was bought out, and the new owner could care less about the game's existence).

Portions of the game run pretty smoothly at 1300 MHz, but others run at warp speed and make it essentially unplayable. I tried CPUKiller (a Windows cousin to the DOS app moslo), but that slowed some of the normal-running sections of the game down to a crawl. The problem is in the game code itself, I'm guessing -- when a P2-266 was the fastest system around at launch, and a P-100 was the recommended system, no one anticipated having to throttle the engine to compensate for four-digit clock speeds. This is far from the only program with this issue, but that doesn't help me _play_ it.

Therefore, I'm open to suggestions. The only thing that comes to mind would be for me to deliberately underclock the system when I want to play that game -- enter the BIOS during boot, then lower the current speed settings (100MHz, 12.5x multiplier) downwards to get a more modest clock speed, probably by lowering the multiplier to 4x or 5x. On the next reboot after playing, I could reenter the BIOS and set it back to 12.5x and go on as normal. What I don't know is whether that could be bad for my system in the long term -- and, frankly, I don't like messing with my BIOS more than I have to if there may be a more elegant solution out there.

Any thoughts?

02-27-2002, 02:26 PM	#1
vsp Syndrome of a Down Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: West Chester Posts: 1,367	Any danger in substantially UNDERclocking PCs? Stupid question of the day: My Athlon 1300 with Win98 SE runs every program I throw at it smoothly -- except one. The exception is a Win95 game that is no longer supported (its manufacturer was bought out, and the new owner could care less about the game's existence). Portions of the game run pretty smoothly at 1300 MHz, but others run at warp speed and make it essentially unplayable. I tried CPUKiller (a Windows cousin to the DOS app moslo), but that slowed some of the normal-running sections of the game down to a crawl. The problem is in the game code itself, I'm guessing -- when a P2-266 was the fastest system around at launch, and a P-100 was the recommended system, no one anticipated having to throttle the engine to compensate for four-digit clock speeds. This is far from the only program with this issue, but that doesn't help me _play_ it. Therefore, I'm open to suggestions. The only thing that comes to mind would be for me to deliberately underclock the system when I want to play that game -- enter the BIOS during boot, then lower the current speed settings (100MHz, 12.5x multiplier) downwards to get a more modest clock speed, probably by lowering the multiplier to 4x or 5x. On the next reboot after playing, I could reenter the BIOS and set it back to 12.5x and go on as normal. What I don't know is whether that could be bad for my system in the long term -- and, frankly, I don't like messing with my BIOS more than I have to if there may be a more elegant solution out there. Any thoughts?

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