The theme of the new Wired ish is "speed" — for the most part, that's about fast cars and planes, but as a discount flier who doesn't own a car, that stuff doesn't do much for me. However, I was lucky enough to land the assignment to write about the cool kind of speed: overclocking, or, as I like to call it: "Computer Atkins."
"It's an electrical smell, a plastic smell, only there's something else," says John Sylvia, his mouth lost in a bushy beard and his arms tattooed to the knuckles. "There's a fear factor that goes along with the smell. You know something went bad." Sylvia is describing the first CPU he ever fried. It now sits on the desk in his home office in Fallsington, Pennsylvania, a reminder that being a power user has its perils. "Everyone was telling me how to turn up the front-side bus, and how you've got to start upping your voltage," he recalls. "I got too eager and turned it up too high too fast. The next thing I knew, I smelled the core burning."
