- Joined
- Dec 14, 2010
What got me into overclocking was a few different things. Be forewarned, this is a long story.
Flashback to 2006, I was a poor college student with little money and a Gateway "Performance 866" computer with an Intel slot 1 Pentium III 866MHz, 256MB of PC133 SDRAM and a 40GB HDD. It was my first computer that was really "mine," but man was it slow.
Around mid to late 2006 I got my first chance to upgrade to something newer and faster. Now I was told that I was buying a socket 939 system with an Asus board, an Athlon 64 3000+ processor and 1GB of RAM, but what I actually received was a socket 754 system with an MSI board, a Sempron 64 3000+ (equate that to a S754 Athlon 64 2800+ with less cache), and 512MB of RAM (either the retailer told me the wrong specs or I misheard them). Really not the same at all. So, yeah, I always kind of wanted more performance out of it than what I originally got (at least on the level of what I thought was being paid for).
What I got was good enough for me for a while (it was after all twice as fast as my previous computer), but by 2008/2009 I was starting to look at ways to increase performance by upgrading to faster/better hardware. So, I started doing a lot of reading up on hardware reviews through internet searches, and a lot of the reviews happened to be done by overclocking-oriented sites. So I would come to the point in the review where they would talk about overclocking potential/testing/results but being that I'd never even heard of this term "overclocking" I was really at a loss as to what it was they were talking about. Naturally, I also did a search on that term as well. Then, I did a bunch of research on what overclocking actually was and how to do it. I also did research on cooling, because I'd read somewhere along the way that running your components at higher speeds would result in greater heat output.-I'm the kind of person who researches something voraciously if they're interested in knowing more about it, so around this time I did a lot of research on a lot of things dealing with overclocking, specific hardware, and cooling.
After researching how to overclock for around a year to two in 2010 I made my first attempt at overclocking my CPU and RAM. It was kind of a quick overclocking session, I started out by bumping up the FSB from 200 to 210. Everything seemed totally stable, and it completed the benchmarks I was running on it (Everest Ultimate and Passmark Performance Test), so I bumped it up again, this time to 220MHz. At this point the processor is hitting 1980MHz up from the stock 1800, the memory is at DDR440 (I was running it at 1:1), and the HT Link was at 880MHz up from the stock 800 and everything seemed to be happy at that speed with no noticeable instabilities (I hadn't yet learned about stability testing programs, so my idea of stability was if it ran, completed the benchmarks, and didn't lock up). Honestly, I was amazed at the benchmark results I was getting, because on some of the tests I was actually besting people with dual cores and/or Athlon 64 3000-3400 systems quite regularly. After that, I was hooked, because seeing how my computer stacked up against others' and that my computer could actually best higher-end systems in these benchmarks gave me kind of a thrill.
The other thing that got me into overclocking was actually a video game I played a lot from around 2004-2008 called Need for Speed Underground 2. In this game there is a feature where you can actually tune the throttle response of the Turbocharger/Supercharger at different RPM ranges, as well as the ECU/EMU. Really I thought this feature was neat, and spent hours just tuning my cars for the maximum horsepower and torque. When I learned about overclocking I figured since I enjoyed tweaking in other things I might enjoy tweaking my computer as well.
So, that's my story to this point.
Flashback to 2006, I was a poor college student with little money and a Gateway "Performance 866" computer with an Intel slot 1 Pentium III 866MHz, 256MB of PC133 SDRAM and a 40GB HDD. It was my first computer that was really "mine," but man was it slow.
Around mid to late 2006 I got my first chance to upgrade to something newer and faster. Now I was told that I was buying a socket 939 system with an Asus board, an Athlon 64 3000+ processor and 1GB of RAM, but what I actually received was a socket 754 system with an MSI board, a Sempron 64 3000+ (equate that to a S754 Athlon 64 2800+ with less cache), and 512MB of RAM (either the retailer told me the wrong specs or I misheard them). Really not the same at all. So, yeah, I always kind of wanted more performance out of it than what I originally got (at least on the level of what I thought was being paid for).
What I got was good enough for me for a while (it was after all twice as fast as my previous computer), but by 2008/2009 I was starting to look at ways to increase performance by upgrading to faster/better hardware. So, I started doing a lot of reading up on hardware reviews through internet searches, and a lot of the reviews happened to be done by overclocking-oriented sites. So I would come to the point in the review where they would talk about overclocking potential/testing/results but being that I'd never even heard of this term "overclocking" I was really at a loss as to what it was they were talking about. Naturally, I also did a search on that term as well. Then, I did a bunch of research on what overclocking actually was and how to do it. I also did research on cooling, because I'd read somewhere along the way that running your components at higher speeds would result in greater heat output.-I'm the kind of person who researches something voraciously if they're interested in knowing more about it, so around this time I did a lot of research on a lot of things dealing with overclocking, specific hardware, and cooling.
After researching how to overclock for around a year to two in 2010 I made my first attempt at overclocking my CPU and RAM. It was kind of a quick overclocking session, I started out by bumping up the FSB from 200 to 210. Everything seemed totally stable, and it completed the benchmarks I was running on it (Everest Ultimate and Passmark Performance Test), so I bumped it up again, this time to 220MHz. At this point the processor is hitting 1980MHz up from the stock 1800, the memory is at DDR440 (I was running it at 1:1), and the HT Link was at 880MHz up from the stock 800 and everything seemed to be happy at that speed with no noticeable instabilities (I hadn't yet learned about stability testing programs, so my idea of stability was if it ran, completed the benchmarks, and didn't lock up). Honestly, I was amazed at the benchmark results I was getting, because on some of the tests I was actually besting people with dual cores and/or Athlon 64 3000-3400 systems quite regularly. After that, I was hooked, because seeing how my computer stacked up against others' and that my computer could actually best higher-end systems in these benchmarks gave me kind of a thrill.
The other thing that got me into overclocking was actually a video game I played a lot from around 2004-2008 called Need for Speed Underground 2. In this game there is a feature where you can actually tune the throttle response of the Turbocharger/Supercharger at different RPM ranges, as well as the ECU/EMU. Really I thought this feature was neat, and spent hours just tuning my cars for the maximum horsepower and torque. When I learned about overclocking I figured since I enjoyed tweaking in other things I might enjoy tweaking my computer as well.
So, that's my story to this point.
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