regency.estarcion.com dead pool

Nov 23, 2005 08:05

Regency is a 7 year old UMax Celeron-366 machine which provides NAT/firewall and shell service here at the Wabe ( Read more... )

freebsd, geek, regency

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mister_borogove November 24 2005, 04:04:50 UTC
Where did you find such an antique?

Computer Geeks.com. Note that I *wanted* a Celeron 366; they didn't have anything that primitive. (I didn't look very far for it, though -- someone probably does still sell them new in a very dusty sealed box from the back of the warehouse.)

Seems unlikely to be cost effective for a simple NAT/firewall that can be replaced with a hardware version for $30 (which you may already have).

It came to 40-odd dollars with shipping, though as I said in the original post, our Airport base station can do its NAT/firewall function. Regency does offer some other functionality which is occasionally handy, like giving A Certain Someone a shell account via which they can log into ICB and chat with me without having to justify it to Another Certain Someone who is particular about giving out user accounts on A Certain Other Machine.

Anyway, it may actually never overheat.

After 6 hours uptime with the lid off, I shut the machine down to button it up properly, and felt the heat sink. It wasn't even warm!

Intel is better about thermal management than AMD.

Is that still the case? I assumed that was a one-generation thing.

it may not ever actually melt down or damage itself. Or not, as I'm not sure when those features made it into what production run/model. (does the motherboard have any thermal monitoring / shutdown capacity? can you read the CPU temp from BIOS?)

I think the CPU doesn't have any thermal self-protect features; the mobo/BIOS has no thermal monitoring at all.

The $7/month electric bill aspect, I hadn't considered seriously before, though.

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mister_borogove November 24 2005, 05:08:56 UTC
"After 6 hours uptime with the lid off, I shut the machine down to button it up properly, and felt the heat sink. It wasn't even warm!"

a non-issue then...(and sadly, the $40 CPU upgrade probably unnecessary)

"Is that still the case? I assumed that was a one-generation thing."

It's been around since the early Athlons and P3s, for sure. And still true today, according to this article:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/pentium4athlonxpthermalmanagement/index.html

Importantly: AMD still lacks *internal* critical temp capability, relying on the external motherboard monitoring has too much latency to be reliable protection before rapid damage.

AMD chips also run at 100% all the time because of poor motherboard support of the "Stop Grant" mode. Some tools will let you re-enable Stop Grant mode (VCool, etc.) on AMD chips, and the temp drops dramatically (10-15' C or more). However, on most machines it tends to make things unstable and the machine prone to random freezes. Something about mobo mfgs not really following AMD's guidelines about how to handle flucating power loads while Stop Grant mode is switching off and on. So AMD now recommends mfgs just ignore StopGrant mode, which is a workaround for the stability problem at the expense of running 100% full bore all the time. Which makes AMD chips power hogs and space heaters.

(this constant mismatch finger pointing between AMD and the mobo/chipset/RAM mfgs is one reason I now prefer Intel CPUs with Intel chipsets--being designed together under one roof seems to give less compatibility issues, and I've had much more stable systems since switching away from AMD)

"I think the CPU doesn't have any thermal self-protect features"

same article states it's been in there since the Pentium Pro, and smarter in the P4.

Just FYI, it's all moot anyway, since it's not even warm now.

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mister_borogove November 27 2005, 12:39:44 UTC
although it would be cool to see your CPU do this

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5393904704265757054

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