Am I kidding myself? (iBook speed increase)

M

mindbend

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Someone in another thread posted a sarcastic comment about the best way to improve Xbench speeds is to (among other things) Freeze your machine.

This reminded me of one time last winter when I brought my iBook in from the very cold car and started using it right away for some reason. The thing was way faster than normal. And I wasn't even anticipating that, like where I might get my brain thinking it was going to be faster because it was cold. I had no such reason to believe that such a thing might happen.

I've seen these overclocked PCs where they do some super-cooling to keep them from frying, but I was wondering if simply cooling alone is enough to actually cause speedup, or if I'm kidding myself and it was just "one of those things".

Any thoughts?
 
Super cooled is one thing. Cool is another. I would think condensation might be a problem.
 
when the processors clock is controled by the temperature, it makes very much sense. I saw tests on ppl taking off the cooling unit from an Intel P4 and on the screen you saw the decreasing speed shown in fps. At the same time, they took the cooling off from an AMD processor which started smoking instead of dropping the fsp value. In short: Intel seem to have a "step-down" technology to reduce the clock or "speed" of the processor. Am not sure, if the G3 or even G4 support this as well. In general the cpu won't perform better when it's running at -10°C. The clock speed is the same and there are no new instructions growing in the processor and the cache memory won't be adressed faster..
In short: I don't think your iBook is really faster.
 
In your Energy Saver preferences, set the processor to "Highest" and then use your iBook -- does it exhibit the same speed increase that it did when it was really cold?

iBooks/PowerBooks come standard with that setting at "Reduced" or "Automatic." Those settings make the system use a reduced processor speed until you really start throwing stuff at it -- then it'll speed up to accomodate the increased load. Setting this setting to "Highest" forces the iBook/PowerBook to use the processor at full-speed all the time at the expense of reduced battery time.
 
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