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What was the best CPU for overclocking of all time?

My old Q6600 was amazing at over clocking, stock 2.4Ghz some got to 4 Ghz OC I got mine to to just below from memory

4770k not a bad slouch either, stock 3.5, some got 4.5+ got mine OC to 4.3 I think no problem - again brought back a little to 4.1 for long term usage - still going!
 
Back then you got the online clout for buying the cheapest and overclocking it. Both CPU and GPU. These days it seems you get the clout for buying the most expensive.
 
Pete Tong said:
Back then you got the online clout for buying the cheapest and overclocking it. Both CPU and GPU. These days it seems you get the clout for buying the most expensive.
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It's just not possible anymore. The dynamic clock speeds and factory binning are far too good nowadays. The days of golden chips are long gone, sadly.
 
Mainly because they cottoned onto the fact people were getting meaningful performance gains by buying lower models and overclocking. They limited overclocking to certain more expensive models only and then with progress have much done away with leaving any headroom beyond single digit %.

Back in the day with some of kit already mentioned in here it was 30-50%

I remember i got a Coppermine P3 600 to 933 (on the godtier 440BX) and then all my mates who I did LAN's with wanted them.
 
Even with chips sets on motherboards these days there is nothing in it between lower tiers and the premium as the north bridge has been done away with.
 
2500K easy 4.5GHZ+

Also loved the old Opterons and the original AMD axia pencil mod chips
 
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pewpew said:
4770k not a bad slouch either, stock 3.5, some got 4.5+ got mine OC to 4.3 I think no problem
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With my 4820K IIRC bit of an odd one - hit a wall at I think 4.6GHz on sensible voltage, but with a ton of voltage could get 5GHz stable but not in between. Never ran it at 5GHz due to the amount of heat and uncertainty as to how long it would last with the extra voltage.

Also the AIO I was using then developed a fault and so I wound it down to 4.4GHz with a passive CPU cooler and just case fans for minimum noise.

malccy said:
I remember the classic Opterons 144 and 146 being pretty good.
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I remember years ago someone turning up to a LAN with a dual-CPU board populated with Opterons and trying to claim their frequency was a combination of all the cores LOL - can't remember what model it was now though.
 
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Just to add some context,that E6300 clocked to 3.5ghz basically gave me an extra 20fps in games. Especially Crysis. Made a huge difference. I can't quite remember, but I think it was a Gigabyte P31 motherboard I had it clocked to 3.6ghz for a while, and the traces burned out randomly one day lol. The smell was awful. Replaced it with an MSI P35 Platinum,and the CPU was just fine. Ran for years at 3.5ghz no problem. Probably my best ever CPU.
 
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ooStevo said:
Just to add some context,that E6300 clocked to 3.5ghz basically gave me an extra 20fps in games. Especially Crysis. Made a huge difference. I can't quite remember, but I think it was a Gigabyte P31 motherboard I had it clocked to 3.6ghz for a while, and the traces burned out randomly one day lol. The smell was awful. Replaced it with an MSI P35 Platinum,and the CPU was just fine. Ran for years at 3.5ghz no problem. Probably my best ever CPU.
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One of the downsides of those Core 2s, especially the 65nm quads, with those overclocks they could pull some current - not a problem on the non-budget boards usually though.
 
Yeah I also had I think it was a Q8300 which had a fsb of 1333 as standard. Was difficult to overclock because of that. I ended up leaving it at 3ghz because I didn't want to burn the traces again lol.
 
Celeron 300a, and was the start of ocuk.

www.philscomputerlab.com

Celeron 300A OC

The Celeron 300A is a legendary processor. It was very popular among PC enthusiasts. It runs at a 66 MHz FSB and 300 MHz, but when you configured the motherboard for 100 MHz, it would run at 450 MHz...
www.philscomputerlab.com


My friend had a pentium 450 and this kept up with it for a lot less money.
 
HangTime said:
+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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That barton core setup mentioned above was on a abit nf7-s. First board to ever do dolby encoding on the fly (iirc).
I changed board/etc after it died (did about 15 months without skipping a beat under daily phase then 1 day turned up completely lifeless) and it took me a while to get close to the overall good feels of that setup.
 
My personal best was a 4790k which would do 4.6ghz all core at 1.2v all day and could run at 4.9ghz if I had the cooling.

Other than that maybe the old Barton 2500xp which could do 2.4ghz.
 
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Scooby-DoobyDoo said:
Celeron 300a, and was the start of ocuk.

www.philscomputerlab.com

Celeron 300A OC

The Celeron 300A is a legendary processor. It was very popular among PC enthusiasts. It runs at a 66 MHz FSB and 300 MHz, but when you configured the motherboard for 100 MHz, it would run at 450 MHz...
www.philscomputerlab.com


My friend had a pentium 450 and this kept up with it for a lot less money.
Click to expand...

This one for me too! Showing my age now
 
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