Blogs What makes a classic overclocking motherboard?

No, you're not getting old - I remember them too. Heck, I remember flicking switches on the motherboard for overclocking as well - ah, the heady days of getting my P75 to work at the same speed as a P120. It didn't even need any extra voltage - which was good as my mobo didn't support giving it any extra juice - just a slightly larger heatsink on the chip. (Which was a pain in the arse, 'cause the heatsink was practically glued to the CPU... I did get it off, eventually, but I didn't risk it until I had a backup processor to drop in if something went horribly wrong - I slapped a little fan on the old heatsink for a few months... but preferred the passive sink.) Of course, in those days I didn't really know what Prime95 was... so it probably wasn't torture test stable... but it never crashed whether idle or gaming (P75 @ 120MHz, 24MB RAM, 4MB Voodoo 1 = Half-life goodness...) so for my needs then, it was stable.

...

As for the fastest overclock, Elton, I believe in raw MHz it is a P4, yes. In percentage terms (which I find more impressive) I'm pretty sure it's Core 2... although I might well be wrong there.

 

Haha, speaking of extra juice, upping voltages used to comprise of whipping out a soldering iron and a precision variable resistor. Awesome overclocks required voltmods, done the hard way!

 

I put a Variable resistor on a PS3 fan...ran damned fast too...didn't work though because the fan was computer controlled.

And those volt mods were awesome, too bad the new boards take the professional fun and the hard work away nowadays.

Anyone remember the many attempts to prevent(or at least reduce) VDROOP?

 

yep pencil mod for vdroop.. thing is the debate with vdroop is it's there by design to prevent spikes to the cpu at load- but intels chips are so rugged oc'ers found it was a worthwhile risk =] remember the multiplier unlock using conductive pen too.. my favorite mod was the golden fingers mod used on the slot a athelons to increase voltage

I made one of those and got my 600 slot a athelon running at a gig (it was the batch they underclocked because they ran out of budget chips- I cracked it open at it was a 950 :])

 

my original pc from 96 was a gateway pentium 166. a jumper switch later and it was a pentium 200! the upgrade to the p200 which was the fastest available at that time was a couple of hundred quid. lasted years with no problems. then i got an abit bp6 and had 2 celeron 366's running at 550mhz again perfectly stable and quite possibly faster than any pentiums available at the time. overclocking is all about making your pc as fast as high end stuff for a fraction of the price in my opinion

 

Aye, but at the time that was my first PC I'd just overclocked... and taking a soldering iron to it wasn't even an option.

 

its funny when you look at the boundless power the average pc has nowadays, certainly anyone with C2D upwards does not really need to OC. back in the day though getting that extra 20mhz out of your proc meant the difference between playing half-life or not, when you think about the market back then there was a lot less choice all round too. how many procs does intel have at a full launch now? i bet it was less than half that in the early 90's