Old School Overclocks

C

cditty

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 12, 2001
Messages
504
I thought it might be fun for some of us H veterans to post some memory lane overclocks that you felt were your best or taught you the most.

I started overclocking on AMD hardware, but the OC that taught me the most was my Abit IC7 Max and P4 Northwood Overclock. It was the first time that I experimented with actually modding things on the motherboard to help me overclock. There was a mod you did to up the voltage going to the CPU.

It's hard for me to remember the specifics, but I do remember hooking to some very tiny leads on the NB as a part of it. I got that chip over 2.8 Ghz on air. It was an accomplishment back in the day.
 
my first oc was a PIII 450. overclocked that sucker to 558mhz, thought it was the bomb. 600mhz would boot into windows, but froze on me. :) no voltage tinkering on my Abit back then.
 
I never did anything too crazy. My favorite was my 700e's on an Abit VP6. Those chips maxed out at 166fsb. Had some Kingmax PC166 ram to go with it. It was my first dually rig to break the GHz mark. Before going dual I was running a single chip just under 1200MHz, but the BE6-II kept crapping out after a couple months. I think that was my largest OC percentage wise, and that machine absolute rocked at Seti@Home, taking one of the top spots on the Ars Technica benchmark work unit for a couple months. Almost with I still had it around, that machine was mad fun. :D
 
getting the old Opteron 146 to hit 3ghz on air was probably my most challenging and educational experience in ocing. Really miss DFI boards....
 
i remember getting my opty 144 from 1.8ghz to 2.7 i believe, this was on a DFI SLI-DR. also a northwood from 2.8 to 3.5, opty was still faster though.
 
wadec22 said:
getting the old Opteron 146 to hit 3ghz on air was probably my most challenging and educational experience in ocing. Really miss DFI boards....
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Mine was an opty 146 at 3230 on air on a sli modded ultra d. Hardest was probably the tccd 146 300 1:1 still running the board with an opty 165 at 2.7 for a file server.
 
Yep, DFI and the old Abit boards were great. I marveled at many DFI BIOS settings.
 
Back in the day, I overclocked a 80386-SX-16 to 20MHz, a Intel 80486DX2-80 to 100MHz, then an AMD DX4-100 to 120.

Later on, I had a K6-2 450 that would do 520 (5x104), PC-100 memory was my limiter back then. Then I tried to BSEL mod a Northwood 2.8/400/512k to 533 (which probably wouldn't have worked since it would have been 3.7GHz..) but I broke a pin next to the one I was trying to remove, killing the CPU.

A64 3000+ (Venice) from 1.8Ghz to 2.2GHz if I remember right. I do remember that no matter what I did, I could not get the HT link to 250MHz. (an X2-3800+ Manchester would only do 2.4GHz on the same board).

Q6600 BSEL'd to 3.0GHz (no option to overclock in BIOS), and finally a Q9550 ran at 3.4GHz for over two years.


Now I just have laptops, and don't really give two shits about overclocking anymore.

NoEcho said:
Hell yah! 50% OC at the push of a button. 8 to 12 Mhz. I remember that too, that was the AT version of the 8088.
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That really wasn't overclocking. The chips were rated at 12. 16. 20. etc. But motherboard makers built in an ability to de-clock to 4.77 or 8 MHz for software issues that arose from the faster clock speeds.
 
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I remember having a Celeron 300 Mhz chip and getting an overclock to 450 Mhz. After that I got an AMD Durian and got a pretty hefty overclock.
 
wadec22 said:
Are you lost? :)
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Not lost, I use to love overclocking cheaper hardware to speeds that exceeded parts that cost 2-10x more. I just don't see much point in it anymore for myself. I recently built a 3770K system for a guy and overclocked it to 4.5GHz at his request, but I could not tell any difference like I could back in the day.
 
The K6-2. I had fun with that one too. AMD was great back in it's more dominant day, during the original P4 debacle.

I don't overclock anymore either, Ryan... But it is fun to think back sometimes. What really brought this thread idea to me was when I was clicking through the 'Ten Years Ago' links.

The closest I come is turning off power management and keeping all my cores at their maximum 24/7.
 
I loved my Pentium 3 coppermine, 700mhz overclocked to 933mhz simply by changing the FSB from 100 to 133. It was a great way to get performance near that of the 1Ghz P3 which was $$$ at the time.

I loved my Athlon Thunderbird 1.4Ghz overclocked to 1.6Ghz, though in retrospect 200mhz doesn't seem like as big of an overclock now as it did back then.

My favorite overclocked setup was probably my Dual-Xeon rig. I build it back in 2003 using Xeons that were given to me, equivalent to Northwood P4's. I bought one of the only boards that supported overclocking Xeons and ran them both at 3Ghz. That was a blazing fast rig, dual overclocked processors each with Hyperthreading 10 years ago when most people still used single-core. That system lasted me all the way until I built my new system around a Q6600 overclocked to 3.6Ghz.
 
GotNoRice said:
I loved my Pentium 3 coppermine, 700mhz overclocked to 933mhz simply by changing the FSB from 100 to 133. It was a great way to get performance near that of the 1Ghz P3 which was $$$ at the time.

I loved my Athlon Thunderbird 1.4Ghz overclocked to 1.6Ghz, though in retrospect 200mhz doesn't seem like as big of an overclock now as it did back then.

My favorite overclocked setup was probably my Dual-Xeon rig. I build it back in 2003 using Xeons that were given to me, equivalent to Northwood P4's. I bought one of the only boards that supported overclocking Xeons and ran them both at 3Ghz. That was a blazing fast rig, dual overclocked processors each with Hyperthreading 10 years ago when most people still used single-core. That system lasted me all the way until I built my new system around a Q6600 overclocked to 3.6Ghz.
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My last 24/7 overclocked system was a Q6600 that I ran 24/7 at 3 Ghz. It could do more, but it stayed cool at 3 Ghz and ran on stock voltage. I have a 3570K system now, running stock, as it is used for work. Sometimes, I think of pushing it, but I never max it out, as is.
 
Replacing the clock crystal on my brand new 286 from 8 to 16 MHz. That rig cost me a fortune with the rows and rows of memory chips...
 
I had an old Athlon 750mhz that I hit the 1ghz mark with. Loved it. This was back in the days of doing the "pencil trick" if you remember.

And my current E7200 Wolfdale 2.5ghz chip has run at 4.0ghz stable. In fact, it was run there daily for about 2 years. I finally lowered it to 3.2 for longevity sake. 5 years later still running strong.
 
My old Athlon X2 4200 hit 2.7Ghz with a weak cpu cooler. Felt much faster at that point in time.
 
Oh yeah, and how can you forget the E2180 -- Perfect for 3.2Ghz - Miss those days..
 
The cpu that sealed the deal for me was the Athlon Thunderbird 1.0Ghz.
It ran stable at 1.33 Ghz....
The fastest P3 was 1.13Ghz and was slower clock-for-clock.
 
A few that I remember were the K6-3 450 @ 600 (still have it...somewhere), a Thunderbird 1333 @ 1500, an Opteron 175 2.2GHz @ 2.5GHz, and my current Q6600 G0 SLACR @ 3.2GHz.

If I remembered which processor I used the rear window defrost repair kit to reconnect traces, I would post that too...no idea what that one clocked to. Maybe it was the 1800+ I won from AMD? ...maybe not...it's around here somewhere.

I overclocked the Q6600 back in early 2008 and forgot what I did to get it there, so pushing it further is probably a bad idea. Would have been interesting to try to get it to at least 3.6 with better cooling than the Zalman 9700.

I was going to go Haswell when it came out, but it is beyond disappointing right now so I think I'll wait until fall and see how the processor steppings and chipset revisions help.
 
I remember using a pencil to unlock a couple of Athlons! Easiest mod ever. Long live the Thunderbird!
I tried to say no to overclocking, but it wouldn't take no for an answer.
Still rocking a 2500K @ 4.3 GHz courtesy of an Antec Kuhler.
 
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