What was your first experience at overclocking?

I was quite late overclocking due to buying pre-built pc's previously. My first self build was a socket 754 Athlon 64 3400+ that I managed to get a measly extra couple hundred mhz out of it. That was eventually replaced by a 3700+ (clocked toa whopping 2.82Ghz) in the epic Epox EP-8NPA SLI board running a pair of BFG 7800GT's. That board was relatively high end back then and only cost £75!! I still have all my overclock settings and benchmark results from way back then.
 
Made the mistake of buying an AMD Thoroughbred, which then got chopped in for the trusty Barton 2500. Think it needed a new board due to compatibility too.
 
I also overclocked-ish an Amiga so to say, if thats what you can call it.

Running it in 60hz NTSC gave a few more FPS than 50hz PAL, also gave a full screen as a bonus. ;) That was in 1989! :eek:
 
My first experience was flashing an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro with the XT bios to unlock the shaders and increase the speeds.
 
Tried OCing my Dad's P2 200 (non MMX). Can;t remember whether there was some reason it was impossible (motherboard?) or whether I bottled it as the pc wasn't mine.

Next try was a tbird 1.33ghz to 1.4ghz. Used a delta fan, was horrendous.
 
486DX33 to 486DX40 using a dipswitch on the motherboard. Later 486DX2-66 to 486DX-80 similarly. Probably about 1993-4

Best % overclock was thoroughbred 1700+ (1466MHz) to 2200MHz = 50% on air at 2.1V. Using a large thermalright copper heatsink with an insanely noisy delta fan.
 
Does anyone remember how you overclocked a Thunderbird? I am pretty certain that you had to drill into the CPU at a specific point to cut a wire then use a metallic pencil or one of those things to repair the rear screen heater on the car to draw round the hole to create a bit of resistance. :D
 
ZXSpectrum said:
Does anyone remember how you overclocked a Thunderbird? I am pretty certain that you had to drill into the CPU at a specific point to cut a wire then use a metallic pencil or one of those things to repair the rear screen heater on the car to draw round the hole to create a bit of resistance. :D
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You had to connect the L1 bridge on the top of the CPU. Using either a graphite pencil or electrically conductive paint (pencil mod).

Later CPU's used the pin mod as shown in the web page below.

http://www.ocinside.de/go_e.html?/html/workshop/pinmod/amd_pinmod.html
 
I remember doing the L2 bridge mod for the mobile chip on the nf7.
Had to put a metal bridge in the cpu socket before putting cpu in.

Changed the way the motherboard recognised the cpu and gave extra overclocking headroom and strability.

Back then ram and cpu fsb had to be kept the same or you got massive performance hit using a divider.

so running the cpu at 250 fsb meant pushing the 200MHz ram to 250MHz which required a fair bit of extra voltage and cooling esp to keep tight timings like 2-2-2-6 :)

Killed many sticks of ram over time :)
And that when you were paying £120+ for a 2x512Mb kit
 
I did not kill any ram as I was mainly stepping up the fsb from between 133 to 210MHz. I did get through a few 1700+ tbreds at £40 a throw. Some were binned from higher spec silicon and the steppings were everything. ABIT were the motherboard of choice for a long time due to the bios options and range of voltages available. From the K series to the NF7.
 
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