The Joys of Computer Tinkering...

Although I love my main i7 gaming system, I occasionally find myself tinkering with my "lower-end" home computer.

After building a high end system, I realized that I have little incentive to overclock or upgrade because
I can already do everything I want maxed out.

Whereas my lower end system only has a dual core and lower end GPU, thus it isn't as fast as I would like it to be - so I find myself constantly overclocking it and finding configurations to increase its performance.

Do you enjoy tinkering with/overclocking high end or lower end systems?


EDIT: Now I have another question for AMD users: Do you enjoy overclocking more or unlocking cores (if successful) more?

I like to play with high end stuff, but most of the time I'm tinkering around with low end stuff because that's all most people have nowadays. If they had high end stuff, they should already know about computers and usually don't need my help.

I think messing around with low/mid end stuff is more fun. You get a better reaction out of it when you can notice an increase in performance, where as in a top end system there really isn't much out that could push it at stock.

Low/mid also have the bonus of if you mess something up, you can replace the part for not nearly as much $$ as a top end part.

Overclocking an I7 is cool, but really what are you going to do with it that you aren't already? Overclocking an e5200 to max crysis? Taking an AMD and unlocking cores? That's the good stuff.

It loses its thrills after your third E5200 build. Though I must say overclocking the AMD Athlon II X2 250 to 3.8 GHz and getting a noticeably greater amount of performance out of it than the E5200 still has me tingling.

Knowing that both "budget" CPUs trounce your High end CPU of its decade because your POS nforce board can't handle anything over a 420MHz overclock and just deciding to settle on 3.2 GHz because it is easy, that isn't so great.

Awww, nV chipset OCing ftL

was this before amd acquired ati?

for some reason it sounds like an oxymoron... =(

I had 5 systems and finally decided to liquidate some of them.

Main system in my sig
HTPC Q9550 | ATI 5770 | EVGA 730i Mobo | 4G Corsair 1066 ram
AMD 6000+ X2 | EVGA 8800GTX ACS3 | 2G ram | Gigabyte mobo

I also have an array of laptops working and not working. So all in all I still have about 6 computers at my disposal but I promise I only use one at a time...

Yep, I guess for us, tinkering with lower end systems is funner due to greater rewards and greater necessity.

yeah before amd took over ati i lost 7 nforce boards in 18 months but i had a few nvidia cards then a 7900 gt and a 8800 gt sli setup after that

I tinker with them all, however the older they get the more aggressive the overclock.

Mainly because I don't care about the aging parts as much.

? huh ?

Feel free to divert extra $$$ my way...

Oh man, my bud and I fried the 2nd one we tried mod His folks thought they broke it and bought him a new PC!

I think the Opteron 175, and E6750 were some of my favorites though, since you could get such a big bang for your buck when you OCed 'em. I still have my E6750 2.66GHz running @3.9Ghz in my current rig. I haven't found a reason to change it yet.

This was way before my time.


and 1.85v...wow

Go back to the original Pentiums and you're looking at 3V

Ah DIP switches. The good old days of overclocking where it wasn't a simple BIOS setting.

The 8088 used in the original IBM PC used 5V, and it's predecessor, the 8080 (used in computers such as the Altair) used +5V, -5V and 12V.

Well as our chips get smaller so do the voltages... and pineapples.

Yep, in those days it did. But despite the (relatively) higher voltages, those old systems didn't use all that much power. The power supply in the original IBM PC was less than 65 watts.

Aren't fruits getting bigger? The average pineapple in the supermarket is bigger than our heads nowadays...

Slot A had an IHS, sort of.

Pick me.

Pikachu I choose you!

Deep fried AMD cpus I presume?

GTX 3XX?

Hehehe... something tells me you'll be waiting a long time (perhaps sometime in March maybe later).

I don't get that much experience with high-end stuff, hell, the best I've seen on-hand is a GTS 250 and HD 4980 + Core 2 Quad.

Having said that, I basically CRAVE for higher end tinkering, because most of the stuff I do are all old Pentium 4's and the occasional 65nm Core 2 Duo with some cheap but still fun HD 3450 graphics.

hmm... that is a good question.

Why not both?