How did you find O/C and what's your story?

Was gonna start this off just to ask how everyone came upon O/C, and after I began to write my little story below, thought it would be interesting to read anyone else's story that might relate to why we're all here.

So #1 How did you find your way to O/C and what's your story? Search engine? overclockers.com ? Another forum?

#2 What's your story? i.e. How did you get into computers, why did you decide to overclock, build your own, upgrade, etc.?? The whole 9!

My story goes like this... (and i'm old skool!)

My first computer was the Atari 2600 and I was a gamer from there on out! Moved up to the Commodore 64 (thanks to my older brother who got it for the family one Xmas) and eventually got a 300 baud modem! Found about BBS's, enjoyed playing the better games like SSI Pool's of Radiance, etc. Then moved to the 286, faster modems, cpu's, vid cards, etc. and the rest is history. Never custom built my own, never bought HP or Dell, always bought local until I found out about cyberpowerpc.com. So that's my "how i got into computers" bit. Never went to computer school and learned how to setup home networking, install memory, hdd's, etc. on my own.

As far as building my own......I didn't want to admit this but I actually bought a new computer mid-May from Cyberpowerpc.com for $700. I had been on a PC hiatus for a couple years (since buying my last PC 4/5 years ago) and was out of touch with all things tech (Core 2 Dual Duo huh? GTS? DDR2?) So I configured an MSI nforce 500, geforce 7600, 1 gig ram.... when the PC game Vista looked great on my 19" Samsung widescreen and I bought S.T.A.L.K.E.R and played it at widescreen but it didnt perform well at max settings. I started to wonder how good my machine was, if it was the "latest and greatest" so I started to do some research on the MB, and the video card, and the CPU, and well...one thing led to another.. and I ended up returning it for a refund (luckily) and went back to my 4+ year old PC.

So I started looking at another computer to configure and then began to wonder about building my own. Being a frequent visitor of Google groups, I stumbled upon pc.homebuilt or something in the usenet, and poked around there, asked some questions. Not a very active group, and for those of you unaware, with the usenet being totally anonymous, most people are jerks/trolls, etc. But a few people were helpful. Someone told me about Tom's hardware forums, and I ended up there. And then I found out about computerforums.org or something like that, which was helpful, but not as active as Tom's. I ventually found out about O/C and I'm not sure exactly how, but I think it may have been when I did some searching about Overclocking or what-not, maybe even computer building, and perhaps a Google search found a thread and got me here. Oh and I was having a hard time finding forums I could access from work (this is the only one!).

I came here first looking for computer building help, while at the same time I began to learn about O/C'ing, which years ago I thought only the very tech savvy people or hardcore people could do, and maybe it was that way back then, I dunno, but today it appears that if you have some decent computer know-how, and aren't afraid to experiment, safely, O/C'ing is not as scary as it seems to be, at least IMO.

So here I am, about to get my first ever computer build and first attempt at O/C'ing!

And from here I found about XMS forums, extreme overclockers forums and the [H]ard forums. So I visit all 4 of these communities actively to get various opinions and news and all that.

Finally, I want to say Thanks to the admin/mods here that run O/C and the community as well for being very friendly and mature with none of that flaming trolling b.s. going on at all. I think we're all here to learn and help each other and it shows! Kudos to everyone!

And any lurkers out there - come on in, the water's fine!

Peace!
-Paul

Google.

Wanted to find more information about computer hardware, and stumbled here.

Was looking for hardware info and came across ocforums.com. Started browsing and was informed of "overclocking". This got me started and completely changed my build.

I cannot remember the exact date but it was a while ago. The reason I came across it was due to wanting to water cool my Athlon 750 slot 1 chip I had just upgraded to at the time. I think it was *edit mid 2000 or thereabouts. Cant remember exactly.


I started off my computing on a dot matrix type printer/terminal that hooked up to one of those really old modems that you place the rotary dial handset onto. My father, who worked for IBM would dial into work and they had spelling games that could be played. The printer would print questions and if you answered correctly it would print a picture.

My first computer was a VIC 20, which then got upgraded to a Commodore 64 then to a Commodore 128.

In around '88 I received my first PC in the form of an IBM PS/2 70. At the time the 20mhz processor was UBER powerful.. Have to laugh at that now though.

In High School they used nothing but Apple II gs's. Blah, PC FTW...

After a couple years obviously an upgrade was needed so I purchased a Pentium 90 machine from Micron. Holy CRAP!!! was it expensive. Almost $3000 for a P90 machine with a small drive and very little memory plus a 17" Mag monitor. And wouldnt you know it? The P90 had the floating point bug and had to be sent back for a new one. Dam Intel...

Eventually in m Descent 2 playing days on Kali95, some of you old timers may remember that, I upgraded to a whopping Pentium 233 MMX. Then later to a Pentium 2 400, which by this time they were all slot 1 procs.

Then came along my Pentium 600E, which started my OCing venture. My Athlon 750 was very shortly after, which is when I found Overclockers.com. Was no easy task WCing a slot 1 cpu let me tell you. What a PITA!!!

Have been an AMD user since that 750 chip.

When my dad and I were getting into the Athlon Venice generation, I saw a lot of newegg reviews from people saying they overclocked their cpus very easily.

Went lookin for forums on more info on it, came across here. Visiting daily ever since and have slowly expanded from the AMD forums to Intel, to classifieds, to cyber deals, to all the other discussion boards.

This really is a great place, with great people and moderators that are on top of EVERYTHING.