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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

That's good, isn't it? I don't want the factory leaving performance on the table.

I do. I've been buying Intel for the same reason as the author: I build machines that don't have glitches and mysterious failures and driver issues and all the rest of the garbage one sees PC assemblers inflict on themselves. Make conservative choices and leave ample headroom and you get a solid machine with no problems.

I've never overclocked anything and I've never felt I've missed out in any way. I really can't imagine spending even one minute trying to squeeze 5% or whatnot tweaking voltages and dealing with plumbing and roaring fans. I want to use the machine, not hotrod it.

I would rather Intel et al. leave a few percent "on the table" and sell things that work, for years on end without failure and without a lot of care and feeding. Lately it looks like a crapshoot trying to identify components that don't kill themselves.

So underclock your CPU.

Because I'm not a CPU engineer, and neither are you. Neither of us can claim anything about fucking around with CPU clocks and voltages or anything else about any of this. If you want to screw around in BIOS settings and learn where all the sharp edges are and spend your time like this, enjoy. I've never done this nonsense and I never will.

I know enough to tweak the "voltage" slider down a few numbers, and that's enough to get more stability. Otherwise, I vote with my wallet, and don't buy CPUs that break, which is why companies don't generally make CPUs that break.

>which is why companies don't generally make CPUs that break.

Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Both Intel and AMD (resp. their board partners) had issues in recent times stemming from the increasingly aggressive push to the limit for those last few %.

How about you "overclock" (overvolt, unlock TDP etc.)?

This is about sane, stable defaults. If you want the extra performance far beyond the CPUs sweet-spot it should be made explicit you're forfeiting the stability headrooms.

Good thing that's not the point I was making, then!

Maybe not intentionally.

Depends on your priorities. That "performance on the table" might also be called "engineering safety factor for stability".

Given that there used to be plenty of room to overclock the cores while still keeping them stable, I think it was more "performance on the table".

You could also get the idea that vendors sometimes make strange decisions which increase neither performance nor reliability.

For example, various brands of motherboards are / were known to basically blow up AMD CPUs when using AMP/XMP, with the root cause being that they jacked an uncore rail way up. Many people claimed they did this to improve stability, but overclockers now that that rail has a sweet spot for stability and they went way beyond it (so much so that the actual silicon failed and burned a hole in itself with some low-ish probability).

TBF using more conservative energy profiles will bring stability and safety. To that effect in Windows the default profile effectively debuffs the CPU and most people will be fine that way.

So now you're saying just accept the fact that they come pushed past their limits, and the limits are misrepresented. Factory configuration runs them faster than they could in a stable fashion.

That sounds terrible.

Yep. Redundancy and headroom are antonyms of efficiency.

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