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What was the best CPU for overclocking of all time?

Pete Tong

Pete Tong

Pete Tong

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The Celeron 300A was good for another 150mhz. But the Athlon mobile Barton chips were awesome too.
The Core 2 Duo 6400 could go from 2.7 to 4.4 albeit it flaked out after a few months.

Which CPU do you hold dear in your heart for all the tinkering fun it gave you?
 
i had an i5 750 that with a bit of poking and encouragement could just about run at 3.9 (2.6 base clock) for bench testing. many a fun friday night was spent messing with that.
 
Terminal_Boy said:
My i2500K that’s been running flawlessly at 4.3GHz for over a decade.
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About time you upgraded, I ditched my i5-2500k back in 2018 after owning it since 2011. In benchmarks today the i5-2500k looks slow but for general internet use it doesn't matter as that type of usage doesn't saturate the CPU.
 
My i5-2500k is still going 13 years later, though I dropped the OC down from 5ghz to 4.5 iirc. It doesn’t get used, but it runs fine when powered up.

Pretty sure my old Athlon Xp clocked well, but nothing like the i5-2500k.

My i9 7900X had been running at 4.7ghz since 2018. I only dropped it down to 4.5ghz recently and I still use it every day. Still happy with it.
 
Hard to beat the Core 2 Quads - Q6600 G0 went to 3.825GHz with a bit of effort and not impossible to get to 4GHz, from a base 2.4GHz, the 45nm quads like the Q9550 and similar models went from ~2.83GHz depending on model to past 4GHz - 4.5GHz possible. (The E6600 and other E6xxx chips managed similar and I probably spent more time tinkering with them but a bit more awesome getting a quad core to that much faster).

A bit more niche but the X79 V2 platform Xeons of the E5 16xx series were pretty decent overclockers as well.
 
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In my relatively recent memory my Q6600 and 2500k were the best clockers.

I suspect there are better chips if your performance measurement is % overclock over base clock however.
 
So many good CPUs to choose from that fit the label.
i7 3820 was a pretty nice chip for pushing high clock speeds.
Q6600 must be mentioned.
First thing I ever bought from this site was a Barton 2500+ and an NF7, being able to get 3200+ speeds just seemed pretty magic at the time.
 
Sem said:
E/Q6600s and 920/930 Nahalem

50% overclocks
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This was the golden era of everyday OC. Intel left so much performance on the table with those chips; it was silly.

Then Intel abandoned tick tock and trapped us on 4 cores for a decade... Constraining to separate HEDT platforms for higher counts. Jeez, those years sucked. I bought an FX-8320, board and RAM for less than the reigning i7 when my X58 board died many years later.
 
LeMson said:
Barton-m 2500
Q6600
5820k
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The Barton 2500 was a tremendous processor, just took an absolute pounding.

The San Diego AMD64 4000 is worth a mention too, that clocked amazingly, I think it was the same silicon as an FX-51 or something like that.
 
Capitano said:
i heard amd bulldozer was pretty good for OC
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My brain shut down for a second when it read "I heard AMD bulldozer was pretty good" but then it finally got back up to speed and read the final 2 words "for OC". :D
True, definitely some people getting solid overclocks out of them, also getting some extreme power usage from them too!
 
Pete Tong said:
The Celeron 300A was good for another 150mhz. But the Athlon mobile Barton chips were awesome too.
The Core 2 Duo 6400 could go from 2.7 to 4.4 albeit it flaked out after a few months.

Which CPU do you hold dear in your heart for all the tinkering fun it gave you?
Click to expand...

Surely that got be the i5-2500k & i7-2600k cpus which overclocked to 5Ghz+
 
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