• Member Since 10th Jun, 2015
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TheMajorTechie


Oh, look at me... you've got me tearing up again. ◈ Forget about coffee buy me a cup noodle.

More Blog Posts2545

Oct
20th
2017

Daily Blog #72 · 6:03am Oct 20th, 2017

Time travel solves everything. Except when it doesn't.


Random Fact: The headphone jack and its cable have literally existed for almost a century, if not more.


My "What If?" story is basically a collection of minifics, and some of the chapters were actually partially-written one-shots that I've never completed. However, there's a chance that I may return to certain chapters to write them out entirely if I want to. The one that I have on mind at the current moment is the one about Rainbow Dash being sent back in time and becoming her own mother. That would certainly make for a pretty sweet fic if I extended it beyond a single scene.

Fall break's started, and now I'm haunted by the fact that I have like two quizzes and a test on the day that I get back to school. Soooo... yeah.

I find it amusing how in the "Transformers: The Last Knight" movie, there's just a single scene in the movie where out of nowhere, Starscream's head just kinda tumbles down from a junk pile.

Haha. Instead of doing anything productive today, I've just been binge-watching Death Battle videos on Youtube. Why? With most people in the area going on vacation over fall break, the internet traffic isn't as congested anymore, so Comcast at the moment is actually bearable in terms of reliability.

I'm finally getting Netflix by the end of the month. T-Mobile has sweet perks with its plans.

At the moment, I've recently began trying to hand-draw some ponies using a stylus on my phone. Combined with the fact that I took graphic design for logos and not character design, and how the aforementioned stylus is pretty much a dollar-store dud-stick, I don't think I'll be making very quick progress. Yet.

I mean, I got a basic head shape going, but it still looks pretty out of proportion. And my little sister, who self-taught herself to draw in multiple popular art styles, kinda just... cringed when I showed her what I tried to draw. Of which was just a basic, uncolored, generic pony head. Welp.

I managed to launch and play Minecraft Classic on an ATi Rage XL card from the late 90's. The thing supports OpenGL 1.1.3, which, apparently to Minecraft, counts as the OpenGL 1.2 that's required to run the game. Any version past Classic crashed instantly after launching, but Classic surprisingly ran around 5-10 fps. Looking into some monitoring tools showed that the CPU was the one being maxed out, which kinda makes sense since the card was from a time when GPUs still passed on most of the lighting and physics effects to the CPU instead of doing it on-chip. And combined with an already CPU-heavy game like Minecraft, it ended up being the single-core CPU in the test system that held the game back instead of the lowly ATi Rage.

A funny thing happened yesterday. After leaving my computer on while eating dinner, I came back noticing that it was lagging heavily even at the desktop. I opened task manager to find that the CPU kept maxing out at 50%, never going higher. Even weirder was that according to both CPU-Z and Task Manager, the CPU had somehow managed to bypass its own locked multiplier to enable a boost clock of 5.8ghz. Except, as I mentioned before, the chip only ever reached 50% utilization, never getting higher. In addition, it never actually got past ~2.8ghz, even though its official boost clock is 3.1-3.4ghz. I suspect that it might've been a weird chipset glitch that caused the i5-2400's locked multiplier to temporarily be bypassed or something, but I have no idea.

Here's a screenie for proof:

And here's a screenie of the current system as it's supposed to be.

As you can see, the image where the multiplier glitched also was running with a slightly higher bus speed. Now, I'm not entirely an expert on the subject of bus interconnects, but the system normally runs between 99 and 100mhz, while during the glitch period, it was running above 100mhz. From what I know from working on older systems for so long, I know that overclocking the system bus will typically result in a wild bout of system instability, including but not limited to crashes, overheating, lockups, and boot-loops. And those were from the Super Socket 7 days, when the absolute maximum standard speed was typically 100mhz. I've never seen the PC in the screenshots ever pass a 100mhz bus speed, so I'm suspecting that it's still a standard speed, at least for some systems.

Either way, once again, I've never studied too deeply into how CPU-bus interconnects work, all I know is that if it gets too high, your system's gonna die. Too low, and the whole thing slows to a crawl. And the rhyming was completely unintentional.

On the side note, my PC actually failed to boot, and subsequently locked up after power cycling the system out of curiosity. After I restarted it a second time, I must've somehow triggered some sort of internal reset function or whatever, 'cause now the system's running just fine again.

And one last thing: This also happened when I installed the CPU adapter in my old PC, when the BIOS didn't recognise the CPU and reverted to a default setting of a much, much slower chip. So what I'm thinking is that maybe something caused a small bit-flip in the area of system memory containing instructions on telling the BIOS what the CPUID was, causing it to override itself to somehow define a nonexistant CPU that theoretically boosted to nearly 6ghz... or something. Computers can be weird sometimes.

Minor side note: My little brother uses my PC sometimes to play games. I noticed the weird glitchiness after he spent a few hours messing around with a buggy mod in Minecraft, not directly after dinner.

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