Best (stable) OC you got on a piece of junk hardware?

Aegis

Aegis

Aegis

Associate
Joined
15 Sep 2009
Posts
1,414
Location
London
Hey there!

I was recently building a little media PC for a friend of mine to a really tight budget and got 2x4GB sticks of vanilla Crucial DDR4 2400 CL17 - much to my amusement/amazement, I got a stable 30% OC on this RAM (3133 at CL18) which got me to thinking - what seemingly innocuous bits of cheap tat have you gotten to perform well outside of their rated specs?
 
Ooof! That's awesome - that poor little C2D thrashed to 210% of its stock performance! Nice job! :D

On a related note, those Asus Pxx Deluxe motherboards were awesome weren't they? I still have a P6T Deluxe with an i7 965.
 
My socket 478 Prescott P4. Got that sucker up to 3.5GHz from its 3.2GHz stock. Pretty sure the sun ran cooler though...
 
That's pretty impressive given how hot that generation ran! I had a dual P4 Xeon setup then which I never even dreamt of overclocking 'cause it sounded like a turbine even at idle :D
 
I had a P2-300 that ran stable for years at 450mhz. Just had to change the dip switch so the front side bus ran at 100mhz instead of 66mhz. Those were fun days.
 
That's wild! Always nice to get an extra 50% performance for free! Overclocking gains these days seem mostly more modest in comparison - I get that technically these chips are already internally boosting their clocks based on thermals and power but pushing these things to perform beyond their spec has always been part of the fun of building PCs to me :)
 
Had a pair of 8500GTs for a couple of machines I was using for a project - once done stuck them on an SLI board and overclocked them... 765MHz core, 445MHz memory from a stock 459/400. Held 3D Marks 06 WR for the 8500GT for awhile until someone from Asus beat it using cherry picked memory memory configuration not available to the public :(

A few years later did a suicide shot on one and got through 3D Marks 06 at 800MHz before crashing and it booted up in 4bit colour after that LOL.
 
Ha! Nice! At least that card went out in a blaze of glory! Better to burn out than fade away eh? :D Congrats on the (then) WR!!!
 
@Aegis there were 3.4GHz models available so Intel had some binning going on, but even then mine must've been some god-tier golden sample.

Frustratingly, I've won the silicon lottery twice. First time was wasted on that damn Prescott, the 2nd time was a Devil's Canyon i7 4790K that I could boot at 4.9GHz and run 4.8GHz stable on air, and pretty sure the thing holding me back from a solid 5GHz was the cheapo Asrock motherboard. And that damn CPU was in a client build :(
 
LePhuronn said:
Devil's Canyon i7 4790K that I could boot at 4.9GHz and run 4.8GHz stable on air, and pretty sure the thing holding me back from a solid 5GHz was the cheapo Asrock motherboard. And that damn CPU was in a client build
Click to expand...

Those 4000 series CPUs both the 4770K and 4790K and closely related models on Haswell, Devil's Canyon, IvyBridge would almost all hit a wall around that point - you'd need a ridiculous step up in voltage to get beyond ~4.7-4.9GHz depending on model.
 
Rroff said:
you'd need a ridiculous step up in voltage to get beyond ~4.7-4.9GHz depending on model
Click to expand...
Exactly, and I didn't trust the motherboard to deliver clean power to get there. Plus as I said, it was a client build and I wasn't going to go balls to the wall.

I was only playing with some overclocks to see how far I could pair that board with the Corsair 240mm AIO to help out bringing some of the client's video encoding times down, but when I hit 30 minutes Prime95 stable and completed a couple of 1 hour encodings at 4.8GHz and still not at 1.4V I really wanted to push it further.
Aegis said:
And you weren't tempted to migrate it to a more deserving home? :D
Click to expand...
Monumentally tempted :D but I've never had the financial security to drop a couple hundred notes on a whim to get a decent board and replace the CPU.

Funnily enough, that particular client closed up his business and moved onto other things. I wonder if I could nab that system off him after all these years ;) and the gorgeous i7 930 system I built for him a few years prior.
 
Can't remember exactly but think it was the dual core e2160 1.8ghz overclocked to 3.2ghz, ran it for years like that, pretty sure half this forum did this back then. Cost less than 50quid I think.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom