There has been a lot of talk lately bout the ethics of overclocking - what's ok and what isn't, especially when it comes to competitions. Well I suppose, like everything else, there are a lot of things we would all agree on and many things we wouldn't. But from my own point of view, modern overclocking is becoming much less concerned with what is ethical and more with winning at all costs. Not just from the competitive overclockers, but just as much from manufacturers as well as communities.
What it comes down to is that in any competition, the competitors will do what they need to in order to win. To be frank, expecting anything else is almost childishly naive. For instance, those of us who followed soccer and the World Cup know that even though the ethics of soccer/football says that you cannot touch the ball with your hands, that in the rare instances where touching a ball with your hands is to your team's advantage, then that is exactly what a player will do. Players in all sports, in all pursuits the world over will take advantage of whatever loophole they can to tip the contest in their favor. That is why every major sport, literally going back for centuries, has a very, very long list of rules. It is not because everybody who plays every sport is a bad person but because if only one person is willing to take advantage of loopholes then everybody else will follow suit, because, when it comes down to it, you play the game to win.
Well overclocking is not immune from the human competitive tendencies. Its about winning and winning is greatly incentivized by the manufacturers and earnings for marketers and league promoters. I want to make it clear at this point that I am not arguing that any of these things are bad - I like winning and making money as much as anyone else - but really, I think its shortsighted.
What I mean is that if we want overclocking to grow past its infancy into something more serious and not just some quick flash in the pan, there needs to be rules that we can all agree to based upon some type of ethical framework that we can all accept. There will always be room for marketing and earning but not if overclocking devolves into a bunch of technical gimmicks that bear less and less of a relationship to useful "real world" results. That is, the more we see results that are more skewed by smart and creative interference from software tuning, limited edition, cherry picked and specialized equipment and all of that coupled with limitless waste of natural resources ( energy / cooling )....the list goes on and on, the less real interest there will be in overclocking over the long run.
I believe that what we need to think about seriously is not so much about the ethics of overclocking as the "spirit" of overclocking after all. That spirit, in the beginning, was about taking substandard equipment and making it work for you. I myself, became interested a long time ago because I wanted and, in some sense, needed to improve the performance of my pcs for the purpose of digital video editing. I was losing hours of my life everyday waiting on every little video effect to render and I so I tried everything I could to speed up that process with the hardware I had.
For a lot of others I have talked to, their needs were about gaming. I am sure a lot of us can attest to wanting to play a game that our videocards couldn't quite handle. Overclocking back in those days was about fulfilling a real need and the results were obvious. Either our computer could play the game or it couldn't.
But nowadays, we have contests where we see benchmarks at 3000FPS when 99% of gamers can't see anything much better than 60FPS on their slowass LCDs anyway =) I think we have to start askig ourselves, what's the point of that? Whats the point of benchmarking at 1024 and 1280 resolutions, with most of the eye candy turned off? Quad SLI / Crossfire benching is, in my opinion, becoming more and more absurd. At least with the benchmarks we as overclockers are tradionally pushing the boundries.
Bottom line, I think we need a different approach and one based upon codifying our common principles as practical engineers. If we want real growth, we need genuine innovation based not upon whatever sort of wildly inaccessible scenario we can create or upon some "gentleman's agreement" but based upon rules and upon real world results.
For Xtremesystems one of the contests we have in mind, for instance, will entail getting the most performance per energy used with different watt classes. In others we will focus on a single affordable platform. Hopefully with this type of approach, we can recapture some of the fun of the old days and create a really useful model for overclocking going forward.
Those are my thoughts but the point of posting this is that I am really interested in reading yours. What do you all think about the "ethics of overclocking"? And where is the true "spirit of overclocking" these days?
mike
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