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What was the best CPU for overclocking of all time?

AMD Barton
Sandy (Ivy if you could be arsed to delid, that's when Intel started using dodgy thermal gunk instead of solder between the die and IHS)

I had a 3570K (Ivy-Bridge, aka the Sandy refresh) running at 4.8ghz from launch for a decade and it never skipped at beat.
 
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I've had some gems over the years including some Pentiums, opterons and celerons. But overall I'm going to have to say I think the q6600 takes the win for best ever. Not just the one I had, but just for being such an amazing overclocker and CPU for its time, for so many people. I actually ran that CPU and a socket 775 platform for years and years and years stubbornly just because I could, and it would not bottleneck GPUs for several generations after it. It was a true legend of a CPU.
 
I recall my 2500K and Q9400 did some hefty overclocks, just can't remember to what (pretty sure the Q went up to 3.4Ghz). FSB overclocking took a lot more tinkering than the multiplier/voltages of modern CPUs, fun times!
 
showing age perhaps but I recall (at uni, a lab full of) celeron 300A at 300mhz, clocked to 450. +50% is probably some sort of record? :D

Later but I had a barton core 2600XP+ (1.83 ghz) at 2.5 (so 3400ish) under phase change.

2600K @ 4.3ghz from release till Ryzen 2xxx.



But yeah, I think "of all time". That celeron has to be close to the goat.

Edit: Doh, missed the 300A being mentioned in the OP :D
 
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Haha the i9 920 rated at 2.6ghz would easily do 4ghz+ but you'd need to to leave a window open and a desktop fan turned towards it to blow the hot air out out lol. Stability was never a problem but heat was, all the chips from the 920 to the 980 were from the same silicon the only difference was the binning which just meant how efficient they were
 
Blackjack Davy said:
Haha the i9 920 rated at 2.6ghz would easily do 4ghz+ but you'd need to to leave a window open and a desktop fan turned towards it to blow the hot air out out lol. Stability was never a problem but heat was, all the chips from the 920 to the 980 were from the same silicon the only difference was the binning which just meant how efficient they were
Click to expand...

i remember this cpu, mine did 4ghz too luckily i had water cooling. upgraded to a x5650 what a cpu that was
 
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Mercutio said:
showing age perhaps but I recall (at uni, a lab full of) celeron 300A at 300mhz, clocked to 450. +50% is probably some sort of record? :D

Later but I had a barton core 2600XP+ (1.83 ghz) at 2.5 (so 3400ish) under phase change.

2600K @ 4.3ghz from release till Ryzen 2xxx.



But yeah, I think "of all time". That celeron has to be close to the goat.

Edit: Doh, missed the 300A being mentioned in the OP :D
Click to expand...
+50% wasn't uncommon for a while if you bought the right cpu, but you had to do a bit of research making sure you got a mobo that could overclock, the right ram etc. My 300A did 472.5, I also had:
  • P4-1.6A @ 2.6 (+63%)
  • P4-1.8A @ 2.7 (+50%)
  • E4300 @ 3.2 (+78%)
I'll be honest, I really miss the days when overclocking felt like you were stealing a march on someone, getting a cheap cpu and running it at flagship speeds just by putting overspec RAM in and changing a few basic BIOS settings. Abit BH6, Celeron 300A, 64MB PC100 RAM for about £200 all in and it's basically going toe-to-toe with the official best CPU of the time (P2-450). Nowadays, cpus are mostly boosting by default, it's all about curve optimisers and other stuff with pages and pages of settings, it feels like unless you are a real deep expert it's hard to get much gain compared to just running it on default settings. I never spent even £200 on a cpu until recently, I would always look for value but now I just have a 5900X. Ryzen is a great architecture, but it's kinda made me fall out of love with overclocking.
 
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Found this image on my PC, not sure if this was a good OC for a Pentium 4 Prescott :D Almost 1.6v !!! :eek:

25DcTsP.png


My 2700K did 5GHz (passed a few 3DMark benches at 5.1GHz) but it got a little warm so I didnt run it at that 24/7 lol

My 6700K did 4.8GHz https://valid.x86.fr/0ti35u 4.6GHz was rock solid with everything.
 
I found some photo's of a few of my old overclocked cpu's.

My epic E2140
CAkeGS1.jpeg


My E4300 which was bought just a couple of weeks after Core2Duo launched and was my first home built Intel pc. It was later upgraded to SLI GTX 7800GT's, both of them cost me a total of £440 from OCUK!!
R04uA17.jpeg


My Q6600, my first quad core. I didn't keep this for very long as there wasn't a lot that used all the cores back then. I went back to a E6600 for a while then Wolfdale launched and I bought a E8500 which degraded after giving it way too much voltage trying to get 4.5Ghz stable.
GjPRn9t.jpeg


Then the Pentium Wolfdale cpu's came out and were a steal for the performance they gave. The strange thing was that Intel used the same numbering for the Wolfdale Pentiums as they did for the original Conroe Core2Duo's which caused much confusion at first.
61IOlwz.jpeg


Another thing is that a lot of my overclockinmg back then was done on a £36 Gigabyte GA-EP31-DS3L motherboard. This was a cracking board with a full set of overclocking settings and no restrictions on anything, including what cpu's you could use in it. Look at what we have to pay these days just for a half decent basic motherboard!!
 
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