QA
Kenny “K404” Clapham
Country Name and City:
I live in a small town called Wishaw,
about half an hour outside Glasgow.....
in Scotland.
What language(s) do you speak?
Just English, though some people
would question even that! I really got
to slow things down for Campus Party
in Spain, or I get confused looks.
Glaswegian isn't like the English most
non-English speakers are used to
hearing!
Your Avatar has long been a sock or
puppet, how did that come about.
While you’re at it, how did you come
to K404 as a nik?
They were both kind of thrown
together when I needed a nik and
an avatar. The sock monkey was
the brand mascot for one of the
first digital TV providers in the UK.
When that company disappeared,
he became the mascot for a brand
of tea I don't even drink! He has zero
connections to computers. Popular
mascots = merchandise and my best
mate bought me a big version of the
toy one Christmas and I liked the
facial expression. I'm slowly working
on a new sock puppet so there's no
brand crossover or advertising. I'm
making it myself; I'm not buying it off
a shelf full of identical toys. It might
take a while; sewing isn’t soldering
that's for sure! As for the name, the
404 is April 2004. I signed up to a
new phone contract then and used
the date as my login so I'd always
know how long I’d had it. I discovered
overclocking and forums at about the
same time. 404 being too short for
most forum registrations, I added the
K. A completely crap reason for the
name! To make it even worse, there's
also an old mobile (cell) phone and a
pair of headphones called K404.
6 The OverClocker Issue 22 | 2012
On which forums do you spend most
of your time on?
HWBot, Xtremesystems and OCX
forums. I'm not spending as much
time on forums as I used to, but there
are a lot of people I want to stay in
contact. I've made more friends in
the world of overclocking than I ever
thought I would!
Do you have any thoughts on NVIDIA’s
policy regarding overclocking?
Ha! Everyone has thoughts on this!
Bottom line is: a company can put
whatever limits they want on the
products they make. Regarding the
voltage contro; the problem there is
the timing. Kepler was released, PR
about overclocking was circulated
by AIBs then NVIDIA pulled the plug.
It's in "bait-and-switch" territory
in some ways, but most of us don't
know the finer points of the NVIDIA
supply agreements and warranty
conditions. If the decision was made
before launch day, no-one would
care. As for the frequency caps for
some cards in the new drivers, we’ll
use another driver version. If NVIDIA
make themselves uncompetitive
for extreme overclocking, we'll
buy AMD cards for global 3D and
the playing field levels out again
once the community has adjusted.
The community has been spoiled
in recent years with overvolting
software. If we have to use “hardmods” more often, that's fine. Noone complained when that was the
only way. A lot of people want to keep
their hands clean these days.....and
their warranties intact, no doubt.
What are you currently overclocking (at
the time of writing) and how goes it?
It feels like "everything!" I have piles
of NVIDIA GPUs here and a couple of
AMD cards that interest me. I have a
list of NVIDIA GPUs I want to bench
and it's a long list. I've been enjoying a
mini break from G80 and G92. It's nice
to bench some low-end stuff where
CPU is quite irrelevant, I can focus
100% on GPU.... the way I think a 3D
bench should be! Overall, it's going
pretty well though, not too many
spanners in the works. Of course,
there'll be a big submission day at
some point. I prefer to submit work
in batches. So many people submit so
many results to HWB each day, you
can build up a profile of hundreds of
results and no-one notices. I'm not
much of an attention seeker, but I
figure 3-4 days of obvious attentionseeking per year can be forgiven.
What is the hardware scene like in
the UK? Is hardware easily accessible
and how is the pricing?
Availability is overall, pretty good.
Galaxy and ECS are impossible to find
in shops though, which is a shame.
I'd like to see more of the smaller
companies get some distribution
here, like AFox and Colorful.
Variety is good! Complaining about
pricing is always contentious. I