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'Cuda340

'Cuda340

Very Welcoming Senior, Premium Member #11
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Joined
May 30, 2004
Location
Folding@Home
Enthusiasts have been pushing the limits of silicon for as long as microprocessors have existed. Early overclocking endeavors involved soldering and replacing crystal clock oscillators, but that practice quickly evolved into changing system bus speeds via motherboard DIP switches and jumpers.

Internal clock multipliers were introduced but it didn't take long until those were locked down as unscrupulous sellers removed official frequency ratings and applied their own faster markings. System buses and dividers became key for most, while the ultra-enthusiast would physically change electrical specifications through hard modding.

The present landscape harks back to the advent of internal clock multipliers. System bus speeds have become increasingly regulated to maintain system stability, which has once again leveled the playing field for the competitive nature of overclocking.

These are but a few of the landmark processors revered for their overclocking prowess.
Click to expand...


Read on
 
nice to see my old e8400 on there.
that thing clocked at 4.5ghz without any issues, or even much fiddling.
loved that chip, first chip i ever had any sucess with overclocking.
 
My 1st OC was 386SX 33@40MHz. I made it by mistake and I saw no difference in performance but 40MHz on the clock was looking better :)
 
Remember when it was a button to overclock on those? I had a 486 DX4 100Mhz I could hit a button to 110 and jumper slightly higher IIRC.
 
Would that be the old "Turbo" button i seem to remember? LOL Made more noise but I never noticed any performance boost.
 
I may hold the world record for overclocking on air from a percentage point even though at the time the result was productively useless. Back in the days when the 486DX66 was the king/champion system (yes I'm that old) I had a bunch of old XTs in the closet including one "Juko XT" motherboard which always gave the best result for overclocking the 8086/8088 processor. So just for the hell of it I swapped out the oscillator crystal several times and put in the fastest memory chips I had, pulled from a 286 (memory came in individual chips back then, not sticks populated with chips) to see what I could get and I took one 8088 to 18mhz! a 4.77mhz chip clocked to 18mhz. Couldn't do anything with it, even then an 18mhz 8-bit 8088 was useless in a 66mhz 32-bit 80486 world, but it loaded DOS 3.1 to command prompt!
 
Just because you can and if you do it better than the guy down the road then it's a competition. Same way a 7GHz OC today is kind of useless from a productivity point of view. You can't run it like that for gaming etc.. but it's a friggin thrill when you can make it do it.
 
EmbraceTheHate said:
To play dos games faster???
Click to expand...
There were some games back in the day that did benefit from running on a "turbo XT" instead of a stock 4.77mhz but honestly anything over 8-10mhz really didn't improve things beyond the initial boost up to the 8-10mhz range which means...
Johan45 said:
Just because you can and if you do it better than the guy down the road then it's a competition. Same way a 7GHz OC today is kind of useless from a productivity point of view. You can't run it like that for gaming etc.. but it's a friggin thrill when you can make it do it.
Click to expand...
That's why I chased that 18mhz. I didn't even need that system at all. My 386DX40 blew the 18mhz XT away. I just wanted to do it to see if I could.
 
It's also a learning experience. I have learned more about tuning PCs for performance by benchmarking than I ever could have by reading guides or just leaving it alone and gaming. Doesn't matter which platform most of the same principles apply.
 
That games not even that old Johan. I remember playing Oregon Trail on the old TRS-80's. LMAO
 
So eobard is one of us who remembers what "chip creep" is/was..
Those were the days.

I didn't see my favorite on that list...my coppermine PIII 700E did 1150mhz on air. I still have it, although the board had to be rebuilt and now although the power supply is fubar, I refuse to give up on that old rig.

My first overclock was a Pentium OD that I mistakenly ran at 66 instead of 33...couldn't understand why it crashed during a demanding game till I realized that I was overclocking it... Ha at the time I didn't even know about overclocking.
Then I got a AMD K5 133 and clocked it to 150.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.....so many overclocks, so little space to list them all :)
 
EmbraceTheHate said:
To play dos games faster???
Click to expand...

In some cases to be able to play at all. The better newer games always needed the latest and greatest hardware to play smoothly, and you could get some playability by overclocking.

For some it was to get smoother gameplay...nothing like moving your mouse and having to wait for the cursor or your aimpoint to move.

For others it is just about bragging rights :screwy:

Duke Nukem 3D just ran smoother with a Pentium 233 overclocked to 262 especially with an overclocked TNT2 Ultra and a whopping 16mb EDO ram :attn:

I have a PIII 700E @ 1100 mhz with 256nb ram that quite happily runs games like Quake4 even though the minimum requirements say P4 2ghz with 512mb ram.

I need to get a new power supply to revive that old rig. It has NEVER been at stock speeds, and only saw 700mhz once and that on 1st bootup...after that it was 1050 and up.
 
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