Special Ed

It's true, I am a special kind of stupid. I mean, I can do things that are incredibly intricate and horrendously complex, and at the same time make such a large dumb mistake that it's unfathomable.

The latest in this line is clocking my CPU. As I complained previously, the generic stick didn't work. It's probably my fault since I had my CPU FSB up spectacularly wrong ages ago and never corrected it. I had 200MHz FSB and 11x multiplier because those were the '3200+' as seen by the board's CMOS. I now know how nonsensical that is: 400MHz FSB on 333MHz chip, hmm, asking for trouble. Why I skimped so heavily at the time on reading is beyond me. (CMOS settings are half the actual rate, presumably because it's 'dual-channel'.)

So, today's little exercise resulted in my chip 'overloading' at idle (getting so hot that the mobo powered off, i.e. 90C) several times for some reason. I'm still not entirely sure why: Voltage was 1.65 (er, mostly, a few times the CMOS set it to 1.84), FSB was underclocked, and multiplier was at 11 and it was still cooking...Finally, however, I fixed it at a steady 170MHz FSB/13x/1.65V. That shows a a low 50s/high 40s idle temp, which is not awesome but bearable. I think I could possibly get some more but with such a high temp already I'll take any stability I can. 2210MHz (+21%)/340MHz FSB is not shabby, and hopefully sustainable.

Anyway, I ran memtest86 and everything checked out this time so things are looking up. I installed stress but I haven't used it yet. So far everything feels fantastic but I haven't done anything other than run firefox.

Speaking of which, I have installed several tab add-ons (tab mix plus, faviconize, & iswitchb-tabs). Tab mix plus seems to be a FF2.0 replacement for 'Tabbrowser Extensions'...since TBE doesn't look like it's getting ported any time soon.