More rants of a dead man

I spent a lot of time this weekend doing research to buy parts for a new machine.

One thing I realized is that people are stupid. Even technical people.

Specifically I’m talking about the overclocking crowd. Now I’m all about getting as much for your money as possible, but there are LOTS of people on newegg who complain that they overclock chips and they don’t work.

I don’t know if this is how it works anymore but in the good old days, intel or whoever would build a chip to the best specifications that it could, then test it. If it tested reliably as a 3ghz chip, it was sold as a 3ghz chip. If it only tested reliably at 2.5ghz, it was sold as a 2.5ghz chip.

Now in the days of quad cores, I can see where it would be hard to build a chip where all four cores tested reliably at 3ghz, which is why those chips are so much more expensive than the 2.8ghz for example. So people buy the 2.8ghz then try and overclock them and complain when they don’t work.

Do they not understand what’s going on? If it didn’t test reliably at a higher speed, then it’s not going to work reliably when you try and use it at that higher speed.

That’s why you pay more for it to go faster.

If you take your Chevy volt and try and go as fast as a Ferrari, it’s not going to work, the volt wasn’t tested reliably at ferrari speeds. That’s why you paid less than a Ferrari.

The other day I was going to work and I remembered I didn’t have much gas in my car. The little low-gas warning light was already on when I started the car.

It’s got one of those little computer things that tells you how much gas mileage you’re getting and how many miles it thinks you have left in the tank.

It said I had 57 miles left, the drive to work is 35 miles, I figured I could make it. New car there should be no sludge at the bottom of the gas tank….

So I figured I should drive nicely. Now the little computer thing has to go by how much gas is in the tank and your driving pattern to determine how many miles you have left. I don’t know how far back in my driving history it goes to gauge but it’s more than today’s trip.

When I first got the car, I drove it nicely (since it was still in its  break-in period) and I got it to say I could get 400 miles to the tank when I just filled it up. I figured that was pretty good. But obviously that was pretty non-fun driving, especially for z4.

So I drove to work, got gas, reset all my computer settings, and went to the office.
Starting to drive home I noticed that it said I had 472 miles left in my tank. Not bad I thought, it must have remembered my driving style on my drive to work. Let’s see if I could get it to 500.

Well, as the miles clicked by the number went up, and I eventually got it as high as 512, and that was after having driven 20 miles or so, so I should be able to get at least 530+ miles out of  a newly full tank.
The mpg computer said I was getting 41.5 mpg.

A BMW z4.

Now of course this isn’t entirely fair. I had the windows open, the A/C off, it was all highway, manual transmission, and I think the trip from work to home is, on average, downhill (though there are plenty of up hills on the way.)

So my question is, if BMW can make a sports car that can put out 250 hp, that can still (if you try very very hard) get 41 mpg, why does EVERY OTHER CAR suck by comparison?

And it seems to me with a smaller engine and a lot of tweaking to force you to drive like I was driving, LOTS of cars should be able to get in the 30 mpg range, not just the mini.

So what gives?  How hard is it to make a car 10-20mpg more efficient than the going rate now?

You can forget all the hybrid stuff, and spend your money better on tweaking a known good platform.

I just don’t get it.