The Most Memorable Overclocking-Friendly CPUs

[UncleMikeRetro]

Memories!
I still have a pair of Celeron (Socket 370) 366 that run at 550 each on my Abit BP6 dual CPU board.
I tried to find aliens back in the day with SETI@Home

 

[jmarty928]

I remember cutting my teeth on the amd K6 processors...my dad would buy them a few at a time for whatever projects he was working on and I would over overclock them to the moon. I remember sending arcs of electricity out of one motherboard, lol good times. The Celeron 300A (malay of course) was a whole different beast. Pushing that thing to a stable 450mghz overclock let me play quake 2 and half life and will be forever revered because of this.

 

[BadThad]

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

I also owned a few Q6600's, it was a damn good CPU! I shutdown the last system only 2 years ago, mainly to improve the power usage. A cranked-up Q6600 could noticeably heat-up a small room. LOL

 

[BadThad]

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 .

You didn't miss much. The Pentium D's sucked. Yes, they would "sometimes" OC but when you did the HEAT was horrible. Which is great if you want your system fans running full bore to keep it cool. lol The CPU would run right at its thermal limit. For this reason, I never bought another.

The Core 2 Duo's were way, way better and usually oc'd easily.

 

[BadThad]

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.

But the E6300 had half the L2. For only $30 more you got the E6600 and a much higher multiplier.

Those E series CPU's were generally gold for overclocking. In fact, my first E6600 was so good I remember undervolting it to crash and then bumping it up tad for stability! I don't remember exactly - but it was over 3 GHz and running at like 0.75v, amazing for a 1.5v CPU!

 

[BadThad]

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

I love them! Keep 'em coming. Nostalgic for us geezers and a learning tool for the young.

 

[Cabuzzi]

I miss the Slot A CPU's in that overview.

The good part about it was, AMD found it cheaper to produce 750Mhz Slot A models and simply downclock them to 700, 650, 600, 550 and 500Mhz. You'd either had a proper board with a FSB that was capable of doing 120Mhz at least or you hack-saw the case open and installed a Golden finger device so you where free to set the desired voltage, multiplier but also L2 cache devider.

I had a 600Mhz Slot A Athlon which would overclock to 714Mhz. That does'nt sound like alot but it was a world of difference back in the days. Additionally the whole FX line where certainly guaranteed to run at 4.6Ghz up to 5.5Ghz if you had the proper cooling and / or hardware for it.

Wow. I remember the golden finger device. I actually built a lot of PCs around that time and would OC them if my friends wanted for free. I used to buy the slot A 650 chips because you'd crack them open and often find 900mhz written right there on the CPU die. It was like thinking you bought a Mustang with a V6, only to open the hood and find a V8 underneath. On top of that, most of those 900s would run at 1100 all day long with a tiny voltage boost (but never more).

My first overclock was my first PC. A "deaktop" (not tower) Acer Aspire. It came with a Cyrix 100 chip that would run at 133 all day long with a simple dip switch change on the mobo. I could run 150mhz as long as I didn't play games for too long, as they'd eventually crash. It didn't take me long to figure out I could open the top of the case, stand it on its side, and run a small fan pointed at the CPU to run at 150mhz with perfect stability.

All this, just to play Command & Conquer Red Alert to play with my friends who had more expensive PCs. If I connected (via modem, of course) to them and played, it would slow the whole game down to my speed and they would complain, lol.

 

[Vanderlinde]

Slot A where bad-asses. Something about the way it looked with the logo stamped onto it:

 

[loki1944]

Have not tried OC on my PIII 1Ghz, P4 2.8Ghz, Athlon 750, or XP 2200+, Q6600, or i7 4770K systems yet; but myQX6700 is @3.2Ghz, Q9650 @3.8Ghz, i7 920@3.8Ghz, i7 930@3.8Ghz, i7 960@4.1Ghz, i7 980X@4.5Ghz, i7 5930K@4.7 Ghz, i7 6850K@4.2Ghz, i9 10920X@4.8Ghz, i7 10700KF@5.129Ghz, and i7 13700KF@6Ghz.

Slot A where bad-asses. Something about the way it looked with the logo stamped onto it: