Any danger in substantially UNDERclocking PCs?

[vsp]

Stupid question of the day:

My Athlon 1300 with Win98 SE runs every program I throw at it smoothly -- except one. The exception is a Win95 game that is no longer supported (its manufacturer was bought out, and the new owner could care less about the game's existence).

Portions of the game run pretty smoothly at 1300 MHz, but others run at warp speed and make it essentially unplayable. I tried CPUKiller (a Windows cousin to the DOS app moslo), but that slowed some of the normal-running sections of the game down to a crawl. The problem is in the game code itself, I'm guessing -- when a P2-266 was the fastest system around at launch, and a P-100 was the recommended system, no one anticipated having to throttle the engine to compensate for four-digit clock speeds. This is far from the only program with this issue, but that doesn't help me _play_ it.

Therefore, I'm open to suggestions. The only thing that comes to mind would be for me to deliberately underclock the system when I want to play that game -- enter the BIOS during boot, then lower the current speed settings (100MHz, 12.5x multiplier) downwards to get a more modest clock speed, probably by lowering the multiplier to 4x or 5x. On the next reboot after playing, I could reenter the BIOS and set it back to 12.5x and go on as normal. What I don't know is whether that could be bad for my system in the long term -- and, frankly, I don't like messing with my BIOS more than I have to if there may be a more elegant solution out there.

Any thoughts?

There's no danger in doing so - and I've actually considered it so that I could make a "quiet" PC with no CPU fan. It's perfectly acceptable and won't break anything.

Problem is, that's a SERIOUS pain in the ass. Used to have the "Turbo" button on cases that would automatically throttle the CPU down whenever you needed to do something like that. There are lots of old games that have that problem. Talk about poor programming

Anyway, I personally am not aware of any Windows utility, though I'm sure one exists. If you want, I can write a program that will eat up loads of CPU for you The alternative is to upgrade the game to Quake III Arena.

[Undertoad]

There's no danger whatsoever in underclocking a CPU. They would love it, because they run cooler.

You're lucky to have a BIOS that lets you set the CPU speed without changing jumpers. Not all of them do that yet.

What's the game?

Tony -

Yours will. Abit pioneered it. Man I love Abit. Though I have a Tyan board in my main box right now. Abit needs a Dual Athlon solution.

[vsp]

Originally posted by Undertoad
There's no danger whatsoever in underclocking a CPU. They would love it, because they run cooler.

You're lucky to have a BIOS that lets you set the CPU speed without changing jumpers. Not all of them do that yet.

What's the game?

From my long-ago brag post from when I bought it, the motherboard is an ASUS A7V133 (ATA100, 4xAGP, 4USB Jumperfree, AT-Raid0, 266MHz FSB, six slots). On the few occasions I've been in the BIOS, I've seen clock multipliers running from 5x to 12.5x and everywhere in between, and it's run at 1000 MHz on occasion without incident.

The game is the old Magic the Gathering set from Microprose. I picked it up for cheap from one of the software clearance outlets just to see what all the fuss was about, and found myself enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. This version is buggy in places, but the strategy involved can be entertainingly complicated.

The key is that with this version, not only do you have computer opponents and a single-player quest mode for when nobody's around to challenge, but you have all of the possible cards in the game (at that time) RIGHT THERE to browse through and play with. You don't have to buy hundreds of card packs to even see some of the rarer cards, much less to build a deck capable of beating the one that the rich kid down the block bought on eBay, which is one reason why I never tried the real-life versions of Magic. Of course, Wizards of the Coast has only sold about 867 million Magic and Pokemon decks and packs, so what do _I_ know about their business model?

Anyway, it runs too slow on my P-133 and too fast on my Athlon 1300. Somewhere between the two, the truth lies...

[middlefunger]

vsp,
there is always another choice. You could buy an old, used system. That doesn't always seem like the greatest choice when upgrading, but, when downgrading, it might be ideal. You can get ahold of p200's for about $100US (at least, here in Minneapolis), and then all you need is a KVM switch (maybe another $50US). I work at a used computer store, and some friends took a couple of machines that were going to be recycled and they use them for just that purpose (as well as file storage for mp3's, movies, etc...). Check around, it might be easier than underclocking your main system. Here is one of the 985 items found on ebay.

good luck.

[mbpark]

I have an Compaq Presario AMD K6-2/350 here with 128MB RAM that is currently running Win2K.

Is that slow enough?

[vsp]

The used system is a possible approach, but not one I really want to pursue right now... it's a $100-150 expense to play one $20 game that I can play passably (if slowly) on my P-133, and it's one more box to clog up my game room. Between the two computers, the toybox full of PSX/NES games and the pinball machine, walking space is already hard to come by.

("Game room" may be a misnomer, of course. The PSX2, modded PSX and Dreamcast are in the living room with the good TV, the NES, TV Boy and my wife's old PSX are in the bedroom, and there's usually a NeoGeo Pocket Color within reach elsewhere in the apartment.)

Now, if I ever get around to a seriously demented gaming project, I'll invest in a cocktail arcade cabinet and see about building a JAMMA MAME box out of it. But between Visual Pinball on the PC, GTA3 on the PS2 and Cardfighter's Clash on the NGPC, there goes the rest of my free time...