>The overclocking community seemed much bigger 10-15 years ago.
Now you're making me nostalgic. 10-15 years ago was both my teenage years and the end of the overclocking golden era. I remember overclocking the living shit out of all kinds of Core2 stuff without anything except a stock cooler and a modest voltage bump that was still within Intel's "safe" recommendations.
One of the best gains was with an E5200 I spend around $120 on brand new. Bumped that up from 2.5GHz to 3.8GHz and the performance was closer to a then-$300 E8400 than the low end Pentium I'd purchased.
The last CPU I overclocked was an i7 2600k, which was my daily driver until last year (!!!).
On one hand, I miss that crazy era, but on the other hand I understand why it had to go away. Intel just don't have the sheer performance advantage to be able to gimp their own chips like that any more.
Edit: Just remembered some of the gimping AMD did, like the HD 6950 that could be upgraded to a 6970 with nothing but a BIOS flash, and the "3-core" Phenoms with a 4th core that could be unlocked in the BIOS.
My first Pentium I drilled a hole in and still have in my keychain.
I also remember buying a cheaper GPU from ATi, because the rumor was that it was a binned high-end GPU with very little defects that was only soft-locked. Worked like a charm.
Yeah, it was such an easy overclock, too, bumping the frontside bus from 66 MHz to 100 MHz. And suddenly your budget chip could hang with much, much more expensive chips.
Now you're making me nostalgic. 10-15 years ago was both my teenage years and the end of the overclocking golden era. I remember overclocking the living shit out of all kinds of Core2 stuff without anything except a stock cooler and a modest voltage bump that was still within Intel's "safe" recommendations.
One of the best gains was with an E5200 I spend around $120 on brand new. Bumped that up from 2.5GHz to 3.8GHz and the performance was closer to a then-$300 E8400 than the low end Pentium I'd purchased.
The last CPU I overclocked was an i7 2600k, which was my daily driver until last year (!!!).
On one hand, I miss that crazy era, but on the other hand I understand why it had to go away. Intel just don't have the sheer performance advantage to be able to gimp their own chips like that any more.
Edit: Just remembered some of the gimping AMD did, like the HD 6950 that could be upgraded to a 6970 with nothing but a BIOS flash, and the "3-core" Phenoms with a 4th core that could be unlocked in the BIOS.