PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Here's a topic that will either get ignored or stir debate. Recently purchased a new graphics card to play HL2, last one was passively cooled but new one requires a fan which got me around to thinking...
My questions are...

1) Is there an effective way to cool SCOPE boards? (Other than just increasing the case airflow)

2) Are the SHARCs overclockable?

According to CW, the Sharks should run fine up to about 37MHz...

Don't know about the cooling, but putting an extra fan on them from the side... Also, the Sharks can run at very high temperatures as per their specs.

A slot fan is good for cooling CW cards.

Indeed my system crashes and the pulsar hanged up (and killing my high tone speaker of my JBL LSR32 by producing 0dB of white noise!!!!). Since I have installed a slot fan it never happend again.

And how would one go about overcloking the SHARCs?

Raising PCI bus speed. It won't give you better performance that I know of, but it is usually a side-effect of overclocking the PCI bus to speed up the CPU.

Nowadays, CPU and PCI can often have independent bus speeds, so one can overclock the CPU without overclocking the rest of the PCI chain.

I don't think the Sharcs derive their clock from the PCI bus - there's at least one crystal on the board.

and it really doesn't make sense to overclock them as they already run pretty close to their temperature limit.
Since I have a 2nd Pulsar I can't run my box closed anymore (unless I'd increase the fan speed of the case cooler).
After only a few minutes the usual 'lost contact with DSP 0' error occurs - and... 'don't mess with the copyprotection'

cheers, Tom

astroman wrote:
I don't think the Sharcs derive their clock from the PCI bus - there's at least one crystal on the board.

Good point, I had been thinking on how it were possible that the DSP power was the same w overclocked PCI bus.

Hmm I have 2 cards (3 and 15 DSPs) here and can run them in a closed case without problems, except when it's really hot in the summer (hasn't happened too much this year tho!)

I've left the PCI slots empty on both sides of the bigger card, and also removed the little metal thingies that cover empty slots on the backof the case, to get a bit more airflow. Seems to work ^_^

A few months ago I touched my pulsar II and was rather supprised at how hot it was. I didn't spend too much time investigating but it seemed it was that 3.3V (or is it 5?) linear regulator rather than the sharcs themselves. I stuck on a couple of TO220 heat sinks that were kicking around, but haven't really had a proper look to see if this effects it much...

>really hot in the summer

It was last summer 2003...

On 2004-10-29 01:10, symbiote wrote:
and also removed the little metal thingies that cover empty slots on the backof the case, to get a bit more airflow. Seems to work ^_^

Take care, my (mac) installer manual says not to do this, because of disturbing and thus deminishing the intended airflow

I suppose it would be nice to get some kind of cooling for the chips. Every other processor has various kinds except music DSPs. Overall airflow will help I imagine, having extractor fans in the case or perhaps some kind of custom liquid cooling system might be of use (shouldn't be too hard to get one). Simple VGA ram heatsinks (that can be bought for graphics cards would do a nice job).
I am thinking of getting a new computer, perhaps go Athlon 64 and PCI-E and use a 6800GT (if bionicFX.com pans out) which might be an excuse to drastically improve cooling for my case.
The chips run under regulation temperature now without even heatsinks, with decent watercooling they could be overclocked to a scary extent. I am not sure how one would go about such a feat, there would probably have to be some custom software (and thats assuming the chips haven't been hardware configured not to overclock).
Either way, case cooling on such an expensive card (or set of cards) is a very good idea, and can help bring the noise down.
I have been getting into gaming a little recently, checking out gaming forums and it seems that the average gamer pays more attention to the technology he has than the average audio enthusiast. It is probably wiser to pay attention to our music than fixating on our cards, but the obssession on technology seems to have spawned some very interesting ideas on getting performance from hardware. They have an overclock culture and have spawned some amazing ways to keep a system stable, one guy on a forum professed to have a liquid cooling system that ran to the floor below, and was cooled by a fridge (liquid used was radiator anitfreeze) which should be totally silent as it uses no fans. I value my audio cards much higher than my graphics cards so it is beginning to seem strange to me that I do not at least use a fan or maybe heatsinks for my Creamware card (which I am starting to enjoy enourmously).

On 2004-10-29 09:16, hubird wrote:

Take care, my (mac) installer manual says not to do this, because of disturbing and thus deminishing the intended airflow

Well, I don't have a Mac, and my case only has 2 fans, the CPU and PSU ones, so airflow is kind of minimal. I guess I should have said thermal flow, have some place for the warmer air to go, somewhere preferably outside of the case, and it seems to work.

When I first joined to this forum, I asked similar question about overclocking sharcs. Most of the ppl thought it wouldn't be possible to achieve. Still, i've been thinking.. if you know a program called 'powerstrip' or something, that allows you to change clockspeed of almost any graphics processor, including those S3 things from stoneage. What about if sharcs could have a programmable clock generator as well? Does anybody have information about this? Perhaps a DSP card like pulsar is too complex to just crank up the clock, like it's easy with GPU's. What about UAD-1, it's sort of graphic processor too and with only one chip in it, it should be easier to achieve. Well, just dreaming..

I'm not sure that dsp (being a dedicated resource and not a 'shared' resource like a cpu) would benefit from being overlocked? As long as it is capable of processing at the required audiorate... I suspect that our dsp's are register and memory (on-dsp) limited. Could be wrong though

A graphics card is a dedicated resource, and overclocking it can do wonders to increase performance...

Great now we're comparing apples to oranges to pears!

#hen you load a device within SFP the dsp's are loaded a certain amount with that device, regardless of whether signal is present. I have no idea what would change with an overclocked' card as I do not know enough about what Vsync and Async mean. I do know that Gpu's and Cpu's often come in a variety of speeds, and its common knowledge that all speeds come from the same assembly lines, just with features 'reduced' when (presumably) certain tests fail. This is why overclocking is a logical step imo. It also occurs to me that one doesn't know how SFP might react (recalling days when programs coded for the 8086 timer actually ran SLOWER on later computers).

Of course one is certainly free to pursue it if you gain enjoyment out of such things; I'm sure obvious statements about voiding warranties are silly in the face of curiousity.

Sharcs are 'realtime' processors, while GPU, UAD-1 and native CPU's are not in the same manner. Perhaps it doesn't help anything to push sharc clock up, as it can't do any work 'in advance'. Perhaps the only way to get more power would be using next generation sharcs with improved capacity for realtime operations. Not sure if this makes any sense?

Overclocking GPUs isn't too much a problem, since they basically handle a single video signal, and shove it out to the monitor. It's partly the reason why audio processing (or anything else) on GPU is a bit useless, since there's no way to get the processed data back to the computer at speeds that would make the processing anywhere near useful (unless specifically designed for that, like the UAD-1, which isn't a graphics card anyway (I guess if you're really motivated, you could hack some PCI card with DVI in and figure out a way to get stuff back into the computer ^_^.))

With audio DSPs, you would probably run into loads of problems, since they handle multiple signals, and have multiple places that they have to send the signal to (back to CPU/computer, analog and digital outputs, etc.) For example, your DSPs might still think they're running at 44.1khz, but because of the overclocking, might end up running faster, which would make the whole thing pretty useless. Audio is heavily dependant on syncronisation between all parts of the system, so you'd have to overclock pretty much everything else in the system too.

Also (and in the same vein,) the DSPs and software gets developped, tweaked and debugged running at a certain clock speed, so by changing the clock speed, you might end up messing up some pretty critical timings, and anyone who's done a bit of digital electronics knows how fun (in the not-fun-at-all sense of the word) that can be.

Finally, I'm not sure why you would want to do that with Creamware's stuff, since you can just add another card and it intergrates perfectly into the whole system. I guess with liquid freon you could load a few more plugins here and there, but the liquid freon system would probably cost you about as much as a Scope board anyway. Since you can't add a second graphics card to speed things up (yet -- its too bad really -- altho I guess some SGI boxes could handle 2 or more video boards), overclocking makes alot more sense with video cards.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: symbiote on 2004-10-31 02:19 ]</font>

Thanks for the info symbiote. Yah, perhaps it was a little chalk and cheese idea, there are too many components on a audio card compared to a graphics card (which doesn't have extra I/Os). I thought it might be a cheap way of increasing performance, although I do stick by may idea of cooling the card for stability. Someone higher up in the thread mentioned that their card sometimes stops working in high-heat. I may stick some VGA ramsinks on my sharks to help with cooling, as stability never hurts.