What was the best CPU for overclocking of all time?

[d_brennen]

I had a Duron 700 that was bonkers, fairly sure I had it to over 1GHz. My Althon XP 3200+ after that wouldn't budge an inch though, sad times. Lucky it was a good CPU at stock

 

[Talkie_Toaster]

I have an I5 760 2.8-4.2 windows/game stable on a Scythe Ninja (Still have it in the box of bits in the loft). Some benchies would work @ 4.4.

 

[Nelly]

i was one of them my 920 D0 was a true golden chip in my 25 years of building PCs and overclocking its one of the best chips i had
most people needed 1.3v at least just for 4Ghz from what i remember

mine did 4.2Ghz @1.216 volts (underload) prime and linpack stable

My first 920 was terrible needed 1.39v to get to 4Ghz stable. Ended up buying another which was a lot better, needed 1.36v for 4.3Ghz.

 

[TrojanWhore]

I feel like OCing is a bit dead these days (as opportunistic boosting stuff has become the norm), still seem to be some good results from undervolting/PBO/Curve Optimiser etc (dunno what the intel equivalent is!), need to get around to playing with that.

Had good fun with my Q6600/Abit IP35 Pro XE, it wasn't the best, could never get 3.6GHz properly stable, but it did I think 3.4 @ 426 FSB x8 (and whatever complimentary speed my 1066 C5 Dominators would do... think I still have them somewhere!)

I also had a Conroe e6300 (1.86GHz) and a Wolfdale e8400, but they were in Dell systems and I never got around to OCing them in another board.

Never pushed my 2500k, but it sat happily at 4-4.4GHz for almost 7 years (started at 4.0 on a basic aircooler, then straight to 4.4 at pretty low voltage when I went to water..... It might have done ~5.0GHz but I never got to a point I felt the need.

As a funny aside, the best stability bench I ever found was the Atari Ghostbusters game (2009) - For some reason that'd take down settings that were 8-24h Prime stable

Also at one point had to sit a posrtable AC unit next to my case with the side off, to maintain an aggresive memory clock for GTA4 one summer

 

[Jasoncmor]

I had an old AMD 64 bit (skt 939) venice core, standard 1.8ghz running at 3ghz, we also played around with the old intel P4's and the intel core 2 duos, cant remember the clock speeds now, but the P4 overclocked well too.

 

[Awahwah]

Seem to remember my D0 Q6600 clocked quite well (number escape me now).

 

[Rroff]

Randomly found an image of my old P4 3GHz w/ 5900XT setup running some fairly decent overclocks - though the GPU clocks are nothing - I strapped a massive heatsink on it and had something like 40-50% overclocks on the GPU in the end. Can't remember what I ended up running the P4 at now.

That would have been this setup with either the Infinity or LANParty motherboard and the 5900XT was later swapped out for the 6800:

Your PC Generation!

I was curious as to what the good folks on this forum had from their first pc up to their current setup. List your PC specs through the years and maybe a little story as to why you ended up with that system and what got you into PC gaming. I'll start ;) First PC: MSi MS-6368, Intel Pentium 3...

forums.overclockers.co.uk

The RAM was running a fairly hefty overclock as well along with a tricked out HDD setup - so for the time it was a bit brisk.

 

[zipp0r]

there were so many good overclocking cpus, celerons, p3's, athlon xp, a64, sandybridge etc
probably the 2500k, 2600k, 2700k were the best of all time, the others were the best back when they were current tech tho.

 

[Yaayuh!]

Most CPUs on 939, especially the Opterons!

Those were the days. Back when overclocking was actually worth it, and fun.

 

[Vipernet]

In my opinion, the original core2duos were the best overclockers. Anyone do the bus mod for the 800fsb processors to 1066? Ludicrous improvement for such little work. I had a Celeron 420 single core I managed to get past 4ghz iirc too!

However, I do rate the 1366 socket series. The X56XX series chips were brilliant at 4ghz for years!

 

[ooStevo]

I'm pretty sure I took an E5200 to 3.5ghz. So a 1ghz oc. Pales in comparison to my E6300 2ghz oc though. I actually have CPU-Z validations floating around on the interwebs somewhere, maybe I'll try and find them

 

[ooStevo]

In my opinion, the original core2duos were the best overclockers. Anyone do the bus mod for the 800fsb processors to 1066? Ludicrous improvement for such little work. I had a Celeron 420 single core I managed to get past 4ghz iirc too!

However, I do rate the 1366 socket series. The X56XX series chips were brilliant at 4ghz for years!

Yep I know what you're saying. Even Corsair XSM2 800 could be clocked to perfectly match the fsb. At least that's what I did. Such a great time to be a PC Gamer.

 

[Sargatanas2511]

My first ever "real" computer had a 2.2Ghz Northwood Celeron which did 2.7 on a stock cooler and voltage, which got replaced by a 3Ghz Northwood P4 "30 capper" which did 3.9 on good air cooling without issue too. My E6750 2.67Ghz sat at 4Ghz for 5 years without issue, followed by an Ivy Bridge 3570k that went from 3.4Ghz to 4.5Ghz for 5 years again with no issues at all.

CPUs are so boring these days.

 

[ooStevo]

My first ever "real" computer had a 2.2Ghz Northwood Celeron which did 2.7 on a stock cooler and voltage, which got replaced by a 3Ghz Northwood P4 "30 capper" which did 3.9 on good air cooling without issue too. My E6750 2.67Ghz sat at 4Ghz for 5 years without issue, followed by an Ivy Bridge 3570k that went from 3.4Ghz to 4.5Ghz for 5 years again with no issues at all.

CPUs are so boring these days.

Yeah my first ever PC,was some sort of........ something lol, couldn't even run Windows 98 se. Took literal minutes to load the next section on Half-life. It was agony lol.

 

[marcus_667]

i remember the old 300a , never had one personally, best ocing chips for me was a socket 754 sempron did 2.2 from 1.6 , then my e6750 q6600 then i3 540 that thing was a weapon, then had a 9900k that would do 5.3+ on custom loop

 

[SexyGreyFox]

OCUK was basically built on the Celeron 300a - fact.
I remember the former owner Pete testing loads of them and I helped him do a few since I lived in the shop.
I'm pretty sure Spie was always at the back of the shop doing them but he might have come a little later.
They sold 3 different versions of the CPU and I had the mid range one that was around 400mhz.
The next big one I remember was an Athlon 1ghz (?) that they overclocked by drawing pencil lines on them.
This was also round the time they changed their name from Millennium to Overclockers.

 

[Conanius]

I think in % terms the biggest was my 1ghz Socket A Thunderbird 'AXIA' That ran at 1.6ghz on a Abit KT7A-RAID Board

At the time I had a Geforce 2 GTS card with a FOP32-1 cooler on it. Hero PC.

 

[Xionic]

From personal experience I had some cracking overclocks with my Opteron 170 on my DFI Ultra D, man how I miss those motherboards, and as others have said the 2500K was a beast. Hitting 5.1ghz on water and running for many a year at 5ghz stable.

 

[Yoko]

OCUK was basically built on the Celeron 300a - fact.
I remember the former owner Pete testing loads of them and I helped him do a few since I lived in the shop.
I'm pretty sure Spie was always at the back of the shop doing them but he might have come a little later.
They sold 3 different versions of the CPU and I had the mid range one that was around 400mhz.
The next big one I remember was an Athlon 1ghz (?) that they overclocked by drawing pencil lines on them.
This was also round the time they changed their name from Millennium to Overclockers.

Duron 800 I think that had the pencil lines. Pushed it from 800MHz to around 1GHz. I think OCUK sold them with the pencil lines pre drawn.