Hello all
Is there any possibility to enter the Bios Dockstar?
c possible to overclock?
thank you

The dockstar doesn't have a BIOS like a normal PC.
But there is a way to overclock it (hardware wise), although it's not recommended, due to stability issues that may arise:

http://gsg-elektronik.de/?id=96

It's in German, but you should get the meaning.

ok thank you

Overclocking by changing these resistors is possible. But the dockstar might get unreliable! Maybe it will help to increase the core voltage.

A bit more interesting is it to reduce the core voltage to reduce the power consumption. Mine is working at around 0,8V 1 GHz for almost 70 days by now. I think I'll have to add this to the GSG-Elektronik.de website.

DockStar RTC
DockStar Overclocking

omega Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Overclocking by changing these resistors is
> possible. But the dockstar might get unreliable!
> Maybe it will help to increase the core voltage.
>
> A bit more interesting is it to reduce the core
> voltage to reduce the power consumption. Mine is
> working at around 0,8V 1 GHz for almost 70 days by
> now. I think I'll have to add this to the
> GSG-Elektronik.de website.

And how are the numbers?
I mean how did it change power consumption wise?
Getting the voltage down to the lowest possible value at stock clocks could be interesting, as long as there's a real measurable benefit to it. I already performed the RTC mod, so maybe trying the Vcore mod could be interesting, too.

The only thing that kept me from doing so, until now, is that there are no real stress tests available for ARM CPUs. Or to put it differently, none that I know of. And if I modify things, I usually like to verify that things are really still stable. But without a good stability test, it's still kind of guessing.

Quote
ingmar_k
[...]until now, is that there are no real stress tests available for ARM CPUs. Or to put it differently, none that I know of. And if I modify things, I usually like to verify that things are really still stable.[...]

Hi ingmar_k,
there is the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search GIMPS. As far as I know the programs mprime/prime95 are quite popular for cpu stress testing (without having an account and participating in the prime search). However, these programs are only for x86 etc., but as stated at top of the page:

Quote
http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/default.php
Unix and non-x86 users should check out Ernst Mayer's Mlucas page and the Glucas page for guidance as to which code is best for their platform.

I downloaded Mlucas from here and compiled on my dockstar with

 gcc -O3 *.c -o Mlucas -lm

Get help with

./Mlucas -h

You can start a little stress test with

./Mlucas -s s

This Test runs >30min on the dockstar (killed it after 35mins) with 100%cpu usage.
I do not know if it prints calculation errors to the console, i did not read as far regarding these prime-search programs. ;)

edit: typo

edit2: corrected the download information - sorry for the confusion to those who read this post before the edit.
the svn version from sourceforge

svn co https://mlucas.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/mlucas mlucas

did NOT work for me!
btw: the download mentioned above is very slow and i had to try multiple times; the sha1sum is

222a1c6cbc7c4fd40a8ceb770db38f6fa680a14f  Mlucas_src_10.21.04.tar.gz

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/04/2011 01:52PM by vevoto.

Thanks for the tip.
The questions that still remain are:

Is undervolting really worth it?
How reliable is that stress test?

I once read something about a port of the intel linpack stress test/benchmark for ARM. That's a test that I would personally trust.
It's a benchmark suite called minibench, that I'll probably look into before doing any voltage modifications. Could be useful in the end.

http://vanshardware.com/2010/04/arm-minibench-project-is-ready-for-download/



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/05/2011 01:41PM by ingmar_k.

omega Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ...
> A bit more interesting is it to reduce the core
> voltage to reduce the power consumption. Mine is
> working at around 0,8V 1 GHz for almost 70 days by
> now. I think I'll have to add this to the
> GSG-Elektronik.de website.

How much power do you save? Is it measurable?