14 Of The Most Legendary Overclocking-Friendly CPUs

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Unless you happen to already have a good cooler, something cheap like this (used TRUE):

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=231004845880

will easily let you run it at 4.5GHz minimum. I bought a used 2500K, won a TRUE for 10 UKP,
4.7GHz with just 3 minutes effort in the BIOS.

Ian.

 
*Hides in corner with my 920 and Q6600* It is amazing how my 920@3.7 is still performing quite well, even while the world of graphics cards has progressed so much, some 5 year old CPUs can really still get the job done well.. @aggroboy The majority of Q6600's people bought were G0s but the B3s could still get to 3.4 with some effort. Still, the legendary Opteron 144 (I still don't regret getting my 3200+ :lol:) and Celeron 300A really do take the crown IMO.
 
Ah the old Celeron 300A matched with a pair of Voodoo cards in SLI. Quake II Nirvana! I think that was the last system I bothered to OC, but was also one of my last gaming systems. I also got to upgrade from a modem to DSL for the first time on this system. But it was simple! Stock cooling and a change in the BIOS and it just worked, and continued to work for many years.

Thanks for reminding me of those days.
 
Shame there's no mention of the Intel Xeon LV 1.6Ghz back when there was a big sale and Folding@Home was really picking up steam. A pair of the D1 stepping Xeons could overclock from 1.6Ghz to 3.2Ghz on an ASUS PC-DL motherboard with ease.
 
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane Black Edition was an awesome chip for overclocking. Mine is still running 24/7 in my home security system... still mildly OC'ed to 3.1 GHz, running iSPY and BOINC.
 
I'd like to nominate my Intel i5-750! I overclocked it to 4GHz within 10 minutes of booting the system up. Been stable @ 4GHz ever since with a very slight change in voltage. I've heard many others easily hit 4GHz as well which is why I got this one.
 

Ahh, the legendary BX440 board. Such a lovely product to use. I still have my old PIII 450 Katmai on a P2B, TNT2 32MB, and 12MB Voodoo2. I think I got it up to 600 MHz once, but dropped it back cause I was scared I'd fry it at the time ( young and inexperienced. ) I pull it out every now and then when I want to do some Win98 retro gaming.



I'm surprised at this omission as well. Most nForce2 boards would force unlock the multiplier, yielding some great results. If memory serves, you could also use conductive ink to do the same thing. My old WinXP box started as an XP1800+ and slowly upgraded to a XP2600+.
 
Your dates on the Q6600 are a bit off. I got my Q6600 G0 off newegg for $250 in 2007 (built the system for The Orange Box) and the Q9550 came out in Q1 of 2008, not 2011. 2011 was when Sandy Bridge came out and became the OCing king for Intel with the 2500K (4.5GHz easy on decent air cooling.

You also forgot to mention that the G0 stepping of the Q6600 was well known for OCing to 3GHz by two methods; 1: a pencil mod to the underside of the CPU forcing the CPU to show as a 333MHz FSB or just raising the FSB to 333MHz in a decent motherboard BIOS. Those both worked stable on stock voltage. B3 steppings needed slight voltage upping.
 

Not all of them do – mine doesn't, for example.
 
Never been a heavy overclocker (usually only go for a few MHz), i really didn't start dabbling with clock speeds until i had my i7 920. I remember everyone wanted the D0 steppings of these chips and they certainly did tend to clock easily. People obsessed over the Q6600 steppings as well if i remember, but either way they were great chips in there era.
 
I loved my Q6600 it was such a great chip it's still chugging away in a friends PC today ! I agree with the 960T mention. $100 for an X4 that can easily hit 4+ Ghz and also has about a 75% chance to unlock to an X6 that will most likely clock past 3.8 !
 
Great Intel article ... really.

Except for the early Athlon days I see no mention of any AMD chips. There were a number that could be overclocked quite easily. Although not overclocking per se I see that no mention is made of the fact that for a while it was RIDICULOUSLY easy to unlock cores on AMD cpus not just Phenom IIs. I still have a 3 core Athlon II I unlocked and use as a 4 core processor.
 
I loved my Q6600 it was such a great chip it's still chugging away in a friends PC today ! I agree with the 960T mention. $100 for an X4 that can easily hit 4+ Ghz and also has about a 75% chance to unlock to an X6 that will most likely clock past 3.8 !
 
I've never really been one much for overclocking. My Pentium 150 I pushed to 166, and from time to time I might have pushed my Athlon XP1800+ and 2700+s to fiures they could easily achieve on air with no custom coolers.
But when you talk history of overclocking, my mind will always go back to the Celeron 300. Most everyone would run them around 433/450/466, and 500+ wasn't unheard of.

I few(?) years later the best you could really hope for out of a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 HT was 2.8 to 2.9.
These days I don't even see it worth my time/money to overclock. The risk versus reward is just not there. a Pentium 920 lasted me what, 4 years, and was only upgraded to the non-overclockable 3770 because the motherboard died - nothing to do with CPU performance.
 


Wow really? It's been known since day one the Sandy i5s are killer overclockers. I've been running mine at 4.8GHz for two years now (on top notch air). Now you have to remember that the Ivy Bridge i5 (3570K) is about 10% faster at the same baseline speed as is the Haswell i5 (4570K) over the Ivy, so overclocking that high means less and less with each new generation (that offers less overclocking headroom).

To put it another way, my 4.8GHz Sandy may be equal to a Haswell running at 4.2GHz, depending on apps.

 
I'm still using an E4300 that is overclocked from 1.8 GHz to 3.0 GHz with a minor voltage increase and $25 air cooler. It works just fine for an internet browsing machine.
 
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