Being a car guy, I understand but don't quite “get” the appeal of drag racing. For me, it's a far more impressive show of skill to pilot a well-sorted car around a racetrack or down a dusty back road, a la World Rally Championship.
Drag racing? While I do indulge in the odd TLGP - traffic light grand prix - I don't make a habit of street racing or basking in the Friday night lights at Tarlton. Running a car down a quarter mile, as fast as it can, is impressive the first few times. After that it gets boring and pointless. The times the cars dial in improve slightly, but there's not much more to it than that.
It reminds me a lot of a certain tech pastime: overclocking. When I started writing about tech in the early 2000s, overclocking was spoken about in hushed tones. Intel and AMD had an official stance on overclockers: they hated them.
They had an unofficial stance, too: they really hated them.
Eat my dust
It's not hard to see why. Tech enthusiasts were snapping up the cheaper processors and running them beyond spec, using software and hardware mods, to get performance equal to the pricier, faster chips. Overclockers were literally eating into the chipmakers' profits.
As a geek who dabbled in this, I can easily justify what we did. On a budget, getting the best performance from our rigs was very important. A mid-range graphics card and processor could have their value stretched with simple hacks - or trickier ones, if you were handy with a soldering iron - and it left more change for buying games.
But things quickly devolved into a pissing contest. 3DMark, a popular benchmarking tool, was used to measure overclocking performance gains over a stock setup. The number it spat out soon became the equivalent of a quarter-mile time slip. While a few gamers were happy to overclock and enjoy “free” performance, the overclocking generation gained momentum, fast, and made it all about how high their 3DMark score could get.
Ego boost
I'm not saying every overclocker is like this, but it's become increasingly apparent that it's more about the numbers and fame than what it started out to achieve. It's pretty obvious when you look at the measures some of the top overclockers take to get those figures: liquid nitrogen, dry ice, voltage mods and so on. I'm no expert on modern overclocking, but basic logic dictates that nobody's going to sit and play games on their superfast, world record-holding 3DMark monster machine. Liquid nitrogen will boil off halfway through a death match and you'll lose both your dignity and computer.
Intel and AMD had an official stance on overclockers: they hated them.
Christo van Gemert, consumer technology editor, ITWeb
As I confessed with actual drag racing, I understand why they do this. It's to see how far they can push the technology. Now and then drag racers pop a motor or have an accident - overclockers can fry a motherboard or over-volt a processor. The effort, cut fingers and multiple reinstallations of Windows eventually pay off when you hold the record.
To what end, though? Chip manufacturers are really not going to take into account the advances made by some guys who ran a processor at twice its clocks. Those performance gains come at the price of reliability, longevity and power consumption. The latter is even more important in this energy-conscious era, and while Intel or AMD can go and run their processors at 4GHz if they wanted to - in a world with no engineering constraints - they'd be doing so at the expense of efficiency. And it'll probably be damn expensive.
Overclockers are not outcasts, anymore. Intel and AMD have special edition processors that come unlocked, for easier exploitation of their limits. Graphics card manufacturers sell factory-overclocked cards to give consumers extra bang for their buck, without the need for technical knowledge. Motherboard and memory manufacturers have developed lucrative business divisions selling very specialised components to those who want to push the limits of silicon performance.
So, in a roundabout way, overclocking has helped develop an aftermarket for performance-oriented computer users. Just like the car tuning aftermarket has created its neon lights and loud exhaust drag racing culture.
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