The Most Memorable Overclocking-Friendly CPUs

[Arbie]

My TRS-80 laughs at your paltry gains. That's a 100% OC by jumpering around a flip-flop. Takes it from a measly 1.79MHz to a screaming 3.58MHz of raw Z80 CPU goodness. Man do the bits fly!

For those considering this mod, it's free and has even more effect than the leap from 4K to 16K of RAM, though that's also huge.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Another great read and stroll down memory lane.

The Celeron 300A was used in the first PC I ever built. Then I went to the AMD Athlon 700 and stayed with AMD to the Athlon64 days.

What were Celerons like? I never had one and I've heard mixed reviews.

 

[neeyik]

What I'm trying to figure out is how the FX-series wasn't even mentioned in the article despite the fact that 18 of the top 20 CPUs in the OC record books are FX. That's like talking about the history of the World Soccer Cup and not mentioning Brazil. It's a joke.

Graham’s article was written in 2014, when there wasn’t the amount of LN overclocking enthusiasts about as there are now.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Graham’s article was written in 2014, when there wasn’t the amount of LN overclocking enthusiasts about as there are now.

Wha? 2014? What's it doing here 8 (almost 9) years later??? I thought that it was new... Well, I guess he had good reason then since the FX was only 2 years old at that point.

I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone now.

 

[neeyik]

Wha? 2014? What's it doing here 8 years later???

Part of our Throwback Thursday - oldie but goldie articles getting a new (and slightly confused) audience

 

[Avro Arrow]

Part of our Throwback Thursday - oldie but goldie articles getting a new (and slightly confused) audience

Well, I can see that my reaction was a bit unwarranted, but if that article were new, I would've stood by it. Ish... Now I'm going to have to check article dates. My brain will be broken soon, mark my words!

 

[Deneb]

I was one of the lucky ones to guy a Phenom II 550 that worked perfectly with 4 cores, even with a mild overclock to boot. Back then, the savings were massive indeed.

 

[BuckarooBonzaii]

I still got my 486 and Pentiums. I was lucky to get two P3s from the same batch with sequential serial numbers when I dove into dual CPUs on the Abit board. Fun days back then and younger.

 

[EvilRebar]

So many great memories here. My first build was an OCed AXP2500+ paired with the venerable ATI 9700Pro. After bad caps I rebuilt with an OCed Smithfield 820 which never sustained high enough clocks or be worth it but was a fun romp. That Wolfdale E8400 was a gaming monster for its time. After that, the headroom shrank and the builds got less memorable.

Now I go the opposite direction and see how much I can undervolt while getting good performance, given today's insane power and thermals. My current 7700X has been a bust for this under the most vigorous testing, but Nvidia's stuff still undervolts well.

 

[mbk34]

I used an Intel i5 3570K in my previous system with the idea that future overclocking might extend the life of the PC. 10 years later it was still more than adequate for everything I did. In the end I had to build a new PC because the motherboard died and it seemed silly being a techie with such an old system. In all honesty, I don't notice that much of a speed improvement even with the new tech.

 

[SAYEDMOHD]

I don't like to overclock any CPU/GPU it was made with limited design performance if You like to achieve better performance just upgrade your components

 

[Vanderlinde]

That K6-2 still to this day has mods uncorking the CPU > https://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-mod-doubles-l2-cache-amd-k6-2-cpu-from-2000

OCs where fun in the past; real yields, mhz's and real clock boosts. But today that party is over as slapping the biggest cooler you can find is pretty much all you can get.

 

[Vanderlinde]

What were Celerons like? I never had one and I've heard mixed reviews.

Celerons where cut down pentiums, with often half the cache or missing L2 cache.

Suitable for office, lacked in gaming compared to a pentium.

 

[mat9v]

My best overclockers were first 486SX-25 overclocked to 50Mhz and 486DX-30 overclocked to 60 with radiator and fan. Then Celeron 300A to 450 or even 504 in best samples and with good cooling. In fairly new CPUs, Ryzen 1700 OC (3.2 all core) to 4.0 or even 4.1Ghz (all core).

 

[BadThad]

Great & cool article! I've owned and oc'd a lot of those CPU's. My favorite was probably the Celeron 300A. It was some $300+ cheaper and faster than the top-line Pentium processor of the time. I built at least 6 different system for folks using the 300A at 450 MHz. It was the easiest oc in the world and worked every single time at stock voltage without issue.

 

[toooooot]

I owned 6600q for so long that upgrade felt very noticeable. Good CPU. I think it was my first good CPU.

 

[Shirley Dulcey]

The Ryzen 5 1600AF actually WAS just a slightly downclocked Ryzen 5 2600. It had the same die and the Zen 1+ architectural improvements, so it outperformed the original 1600 at the same clock speed, especially in multicore applications where the issue of high cross-CCX latency came into play.

Modern CPUs don't have nearly as much overclocking potential unless you resort to extreme measures like cryogenic cooling. And on Ryzen, Precision Boost Overdrive can already unlock nearly all of your chip's potential automatically; there isn't much left on the table for the enthusiast to do. Nowadays most of the adventure is in undervolting; by slightly lowering the voltage to your CPU, you can increase the amount of time your CPU can run at its maximum boost speed without hitting thermal limits that are enforced by the chip.

 

[netto]

I never realize that Pentium D820, Pentium Core 2 Duo E2160 and Core 2 Quad Q6600 was overclock friendly. I was own those, and run it on stock clock. I wish I know sooner .

 

[Axeia]

I have always had terrible luck with overclocking except with the 2500k. Could get that to 4.8Ghz although with a voltage that kicked off more heat then I liked on hot summer days so I stuck to 4.6Ghz.
Everything else desktop wise sucked for me. Especially with graphics cards.

My Nokia N900 smartphone however was a beast! Could overclocking it to 1Ghz (up from 600Mhz) without any extra voltage or obviously cooling. Made a massive difference in the user experience too, made all the animations smooth and emulators that were sluggish on the base speed ran like a dream with the overclock.

 

[bviktor]

So happy to see Northwood there. Memories <3 I never owned one, but the PC Guru article about its overclocking was an extremely joyful read from a journalist that truly loved his work.

Shout out to OldMan @ PC Tuning section <3

 

[OortCloud]

Great article - nice to have something that doesn't involve AI, Musk or Trump!
My trusty Q6600 is still going - admittedly in my Aunts PC - but still...

 

[GenFUBAR]

What about the i5-7600k? Was a gaming force in its day. Had mine clocked to 5.0Ghz, but clocked it back to 4.9Ghz to make it more stable. It rocked for its time.
Interesting fact. That same CPU went on to become my wifes work from home pc, that she's still using to this day. Though I did downclock it to 4.5Ghz. Just to make sure it was stable for he work. She uses it for all the admin stuff she does for her work. I passed it onto her back in July 2019. It was overkill for what she does back then.
Specs are the above mentioned cpu, 32gig ram, Gigabyte F1 mb, ROG Strix RX580 8gig gpu. Prob still a little overkill now. LOL.

 

[Phenomi3]

Honorable mention is due for the Phenom X6 1055T (Thuban). Was able to OC this bad boy from 2.8ghz to 4.0ghz without many issues.

 

[Kougar]

Forget the E6600, my favorite will always be the E6300. Not only was Conroe itself a crazy strong performance bump at the time, but $183 for a dual-core chip was amazing. The E6300 was a paltry 1.86Ghz but a very mild voltage bump would let you run it at a full 100% overclock 24/7 stable for nearly equal performance as an overclocked $999 X6800. The CPU wasn't even the bottleneck, it was the FSB capability of the motherboard. I ran my E6300 at 3.8Ghz for years on a P35 chipset board, 24/7 stable and it didn't even get particularly warm doing it. Sure the Q6600 eventually got cheap a few years later, but not even good watercooling could tame that chip's heat output at 4Ghz.

Almost got 3.9Ghz stable out of that E6300 too, but there just wasn't enough FSB headroom left on the motherboard to make it reliable. Maybe some super expensive P35 board might've done it, but at that point it would no longer have been such a crazy good value chip which would defeat the purpose.

 

[mcnabney]

Nice article.
For me I got K6-2 up to 400 stable, pencilled Thunderbird up to 900, and my Core2 8400 is still being used by my son and it is clocked at 4ghz and has been just fine for 16 years.