Opteron/San Diego 3700+ CACJE Is my favorite of all time. Blew the LGA775 intels out of the water back in the day before conroe was released.
You've got a good point there. I was impressed by my 3700+ as well. Got me to 3.1GHz for benching (24/7 stable around 3GHz IIRC), would have taken a Pentium 4 775 CPU around 4.7-5GHz or so to have the equivalent performance.
Hell I just want a 2500K.
Outdated by 2 generations, but still a viable choice for gaming, and maybe some cpu cryptomining.
I'm looking even farther back than you.
I just picked up an LGA1366 Core i7 930 so that I can upgrade to a newer platform.
So you guys all seem to have been enthusiasts even back then. How much more tweaking was required to properly overclock a cpu. I really want to get an old system to play around with but i dont want to drop a few on one if i aint got a clue going into it.
Edit: if you couldnt tell im young so thats why im asking a large plethora of questions i only just built my first system last summer yet a teacher of mine says id floor most people with what ik. Hence the large enthusiasm.
As for myself, I built my first system from scratch in 2006. Think I was eighteen at the time. You sound a bit like me when I first started out. I had a lot of questions back then too.
I read a lot of hardware reviews, overclocking guides, and cooling guides when I first started out. Didn't first attempt overclocking myself until 2008/2009 with my AMD socket 754 rig, overclocked my 1.8GHz single core Sempron to 2.1GHz. Could have gone higher, but my motherboard was of lower quality and just didn't have the durability to accommodate a high overclock.
Then, I bought a used board, which I used along with a free CPU and memory, and upgraded to Intel LGA775 in 2011 and quickly set about overclocking it. Didn't have a lot of money, so had to go with an older platform that I could afford.
As far as the amount of tweaking required, it really depends on what platform it is.