Oldies Goldies: A 14-Year Old Celeron D 347 Overclocked to 8.37 GHz

Based on Intel's Netburst microarchitecture and made using 65nm process technology, the Intel Celeron D 300-series processors codenamed Cedar Mill has never been known for high performance but got famous for their spectacular overclockability, which was only challenged only by AMD's FX CPUs powered by the Bulldozer microarchitecture. This week an overclocker from China once again broke the 8.0 GHz barrier with his Celeron D 347 chip. 

To push his single-core Celeron D 347 with a default frequency of 3.06 GHz (and an 85W TDP) all the way up to 8362 MHz, overclocker Ivanqu0208 used the Asus P5E64 Professional motherboard based on the Intel X38 chipset, though it is unclear whether any modifications to the platform's voltage regulating module have been made. Traditionally for extreme overclocking, liquid nitrogen was used for cooling. 

Without any doubt, 8362 MHz is a spectacular result for a 2006 chip made using Intel's 65 nm process technology; it is actually the 16th highest frequency ever achieved by an x86 processor and validated by CPU-Z. Yet, it is not the highest clock for a Netburst CPU. That record belongs to the Celeron D 352 processor overclocked by wytiwx to 8543 MHz. Meanwhile, the absolute record — 8722 MHz — is held by AMD's FX-8370 processor cooled using liquid nitrogen. The Stilt set the record in 2014. 

It is noteworthy that the 8.0 GHz barrier is rather hard to break, and to date, only 117 processors have managed to pass it. The vast majority of the processors to hit 8.0 GHz or higher frequency are AMD's FX 8000-series units, as well as Intel's Cedar Mill-based Celeron D or Pentium CPUs, but there are also several AMD's A-series APUs too.