14 Of The Most Legendary Overclocking-Friendly CPUs
14 Of The Most Legendary Overclocking-Friendly CPUs
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What Makes A CPU Overclocking Legend?
Since the birth of the IBM-compatible PC, a number of processors have distinguished themselves as particularly good candidates for aggressive overclocking. Some models are known for exceptional headroom, while others were popular for how inexpensive they were. We even remember a few unique opportunities to unlock on-chip resources that shipped turned off.
Join us as we travel down memory lane, compiling a list of some of the most notable overclocking processors.
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Me - OK. I want that board (ΒΧ440) and I also want the Celleron 300A
Seller - With only 2000 more drachmas (6 euros) you can buy the faster 333A.
Me - I don't know, I don't want to spend more money.
Seller - It is worth it. It is faster and the difference in price small.
Me - OK put the 333A then in the order.
Almost 15 years latter I STILL HATE HIM
...lol
Maybe next year i move to what SR brings.
Pun intended.
I think that needs either correction or clarification. I doubt I'm the only one that read it as saying that the Q9550 released in 2011 (it was actually released in March 2008) rather than the probably intended meaning of taking over the budget overclocking CPU position.
Unlockable to 6 cores, and overclockable to 4ghz!
Just when i7-920 was feeling slightly dated, game developers started making games more multi-threaded which gave this baby a new lease of life.
Me - OK. I want that board (ΒΧ440) and I also want the Celleron 300A
Seller - With only 2000 more drachmas (6 euros) you can buy the faster 333A.
Me - I don't know, I don't want to spend more money.
Seller - It is worth it. It is faster and the difference in price small.
Me - OK put the 333A then in the order.
Almost 15 years latter I STILL HATE HIM
...lol
That was made popular by the first internal cache on x86 processors. Overclocking a chip without an internal cache had poor performance improvement. But, again, that doesn't relate to overclocking. It does relate to the fact that they were reaching a point where it was very difficult to make motherboards handle bus speeds as high as the processors (although Intel would return to that with the original Pentiums, never to return).
The 286 was a more complete overclock, since it increased the speed of everything. If you overclocked the 286 by 33%, everything ran 33% faster, even the system bus. That never happened again. Most implementations of the 386 (and even later releases of the 286) ran the AT-Bus (commonly erroneously called the ISA bus), at 8 or 10 MHz, regardless of CPU speed.
Overclocking the original PC/AT 139 was so common (from 6 Mhz to 8 Mhz), IBM put a timing loop in ROM for the 239 that prevented it. Eventually, the 339 ran at 8 MHz out of the box.
Overclocking these machines often required more skill than modern machines, as you'd have to buy a different crystal, desolder the old one, and solder the new one in. If the memory chips were close to timing, they'd have to come out too. Luckily, most were not soldered in. IBM's had a perverse piggybacked arrangement though, where they would put one 64K chip right on top of another, and they were soldered together. It looked horrible, but somehow worked like a 128Kb chip (which there never was, they went from 16K to 64K to 256K).
Leaving out the 286 is silly. It was really the first one commonly overclocked (I never hard of anyone overclocking an 8088, but someone probably did), and actually forced the largest computer company in the world to put in safeguards around it to prevent it. As strange as it sounds, my original 8 MHz Tandy 3000 showed a nice improvement going to 10 MHz. One SCSI card didn't like the faster bus, but everything else was fine. Adding in a zero wait state memory card from Cheetah also dramatically improved performance.
Even the 386 was commonly overclocked, and there were a lot of scandals because companies would buy lower clocked 386s from Intel, get rid of the silk screen, and than overclock them in the machines they would sell, without telling anyone. What a mess that was ...
Hence why they started locking the multipliers...
One of the most fun OC was two Celerons on a Abit BP6 (Dual Socket), from poor to awesome (for the time) speed surpassing pretty much any system.
Hope intel will get some real competition again, it shows they know they lack competition and thus can be lazy and cheap when it comes to oc (the haswell's soldering is just one example)..
For newer CPUs, I'd include Clarkdale. The i3 550 oc's like an absolute
monster. Even on a pretty average P55 board, it'll easily reach 4.7 vs. its
stock 3.2. At 4.7 its performance is very good.
Ian.