14 Of The Most Legendary Overclocking-Friendly CPUs

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I to loved my opteron 144 back in 2005, for years that thing worked well. In 2010 I bought a i7 930 which has been oc'd to 3.6ghz for over 3 years now (no higher frequency for power vs performance reasons) I was hoping haswell was going to be the next golden sample but alas it is not. Waiting for something to double the performance of my 930 is like watching paint dry.
 
I see most of my pets in there.

My fav is still the Q6600 G0 SLACR which I currently run ... tho I had plenty of luck with the E5300 Penryn duallies.

The Q is still very stable.

I also had a AMD 5X86-133 which I ran at 160 (40X4 vs 33X4) straight out of the box - back in the day that meant my 486 was as quick as the early Pentiums ... at a fraction of the cost.

I had an XP 3200+ Barton with a 512 cache that ran at 2.65 with a refridgerated water cooler @ 4 degrees C ... that one was hard to keep stable ... and probably a waste of time.

I'd be interested to hear what crashman's favourites are Don ... he tended to champion the cheapy Pentium D805? I think ... tho they were a bit of an atomic reactor and mobos without good heatsinks on the voltage regulators would die easily.

Thanks for the memories ...
 
The Rana 445 in the Athlon x3 3.1 gave me an unlockable STABLE 4th core at a far lower price than these, and registered [to my recollection] as a Phenom II BE and got it clocked to 4.0, and paired with my refurbished 5670 and OEM scraps for everything else, I had a hell of a gaming computer 4 years ago. Thanks, AMD!
 


It may mean less with each new generation but the sad truth is that Intel still haven't surpassed their own 2500K from January 2011. Your 2.5-years old CPU is still just as fast as Intel's latest that came out just 1 month ago. The IPC advantage of Haswell is almost exactly the same as its overclocking disadvantage, so the end result is +/- 0%.

You may get lucky and get a Haswell chip that does 4.5 GHz on air, which would make it equal to maybe a 5.1 GHz SB, but you're just as likely to only reach 4.2-4.3 GHz. Sure, you can apply more exotic cooling methods and reach 4.6-4.8 GHz with Haswell, but those same exotic coolers work just fine with the 2500K too, increasing its overclock headroom by the same amount. At best, you're looking at a 10% performance improvement in total over 2.5 years. Moore's law is officially dead and buried.
 
Really ... 14 pictures and and that is it? Pretty much a waist of time. I was past the picture stage before grade one. Some writing would be appreciated.
 
Really ... 14 pictures and and that is it? Pretty much a waist of time. I was past the picture stage before grade one. Some writing would be appreciated.
 


The text was to the right of the pictures ... with a "more" link if you wanted to read more.

I thought Don was pretty succinct ... I on the other hand would have blathered on about all sorts of things off-topic.

Thats why we pay Don to write nice short articles using an economic writing style ... "hacks" or tech journalists, tend to do that if they want to be read and get paid.

If you want to read gibberish come over to the top of the forums and dribble on with the other CPU donuts ... they / we will love you !!

:)

 
100MHz fsb P3 Tualatin celeron's were identical to 133MHz Tualatin P3's, even the same amount of L1 & L2 cache. I got a 1.3GHz P3 out of a 1GHz celeron, and a 1.6GHz P3 out of a 1.2GHz celeron, just by bumping up the fsb to 133MHz. No tricks or extra cooling required. The celeron @ 1.6 didn't run too hot, and the celeron @ 1.3 ran cooler than a 1GHz coppermine P3 at standard speed.
 
OMG, How old are you guys.... I turn 42 tomorrow and not until right now, when I ran across this , did I feel old... and the more I remember the 440 bx that fueled this entire trainwreck, the more I smile. I heard about clockspeed and FSB and Multis and got movement down deep when over 100 Mhz on busspeed stable I achieved. I have no time but I had to toss my foot in the door here cuz , I felt my roots tugging at me. Don, U made my night brother , and I will return in a while to this post cuz I have warm fuzzies now... warm fuzzies were hard to get in the day, especialy when your wife watches u react violently to your first failed bios update. no more fuzzies for u for a while... this brings back so much recall and sprouts so many different writeble topic ideas for me. Ill be back when I can give this my earned attention. lets go back to the day we learned that we could unlock AMD, with a no. 2 pencil. WOOD!
 
My first overclock was pressing the turbo button on my brother PC 8mhz to 12mhz 😀
playing wolfenstein and prince on that beast
 
Would like to cast my vote for the Core i5-760. From stock ~2.8GHz to ~4.2GHz stable on air cooling. 4.4GHz would work at a stretch but I didn't really want to push the chip that hard.
 
teh_gerbil - "You're missing the rare hexa core AMD 960t, 4x 3ghz.
Unlockable to 6 cores, and overclockable to 4ghz!"

That processor was never a full retail release if I remember correctly. This could be why it isn't on the list. I agree however that it was an awesome budget chip!!

I also think they left out the Phenom II 955 BE - This processor would hit 4.2Ghz and was only $100 towards it's end and $150 when it was newer. Also you didn't need a $200 motherboard to get those speeds...
 
I consider the roll of dice lucky on my particular Phenom II x3 720. I put that machine together soon after its release in early 2009. Was able to get a stable overclock of 3.5 with a basic heatsink/fan from Best Buy. About a year I learned about unlocking the 4th core and found an bios update to my Gigabyte board that allowed for this. Not leaving well alone, I pushed the clocks on the 4th (along with a new Hyper 212 Evo cooler) back to 3.5 and got windows bootable with 3.725 on all 4 cores. I think that was with just 1.45V. I have since discovered the joys of software overclocking (vs hard coding bios settings) that I can dynamically change power states with voltages. I run all 4 cores anywhere at idle @ 1.0 to full power at 3.5. This processor is still in my main windows/gaming PC. I've overclocked Northwood P4's and Barton Athlon XP's before, but this one has been the most fun.
 

Actually, the turbo button would have dropped it from its rated 12 MHz to 8 MHz so that the games weren't too fast. So you were underclocking, not overclocking.
 
This brings back memories.

My first real computer had an 80486 DX2 40. Though it wasn't overclocked until I was looking to upgrade in high school and read about the Celeron 300A. Cut my teeth on the old 486 and weeks later had a machine running 450mhz on the Celery (as we used to call it) 300A.

The next two really great overclocking processors I used were the Q6600. Ran at 3.8ghz and just plain spanked everything I had ever touched before by a landslide.

Then along came the i7 920. It's still running in my every day machine. It ran for the first few years at 4.6ghz. Now it's at 4.4ghz after an upgrade to a 24gb ram kit last year.

I may replace it with a haswell setup this year. If not, I may go for ivy bridge-e when a new chipset is available. Although that represents quite a step up in price point and kind of negates the cost saving spirit of overclocking.
 


I mentioned Clarkedale earlier, but yes Lynnfield aswell, especially the 760. The 870 can oc rather
nicely too, though with somewhat higher heat (mine is at 4.3). I had a 760 going at 4.4 for a while,
but it's on a different board now, not configured. Bought two more 760s for oc fun but haven't done
anything with them yet.

Ian.

 
My e8400 has been at 3.81 with no voltage increase since it came out on a GA ep35ds3l that I got open box for like 70 bucks. Dual boots Mac and win 7. Still can play most games well on a OC to hell and back GTX 260-216. 100 percent compatible with Mac OS. Hell even the webcam and facetime work. Got to love spending 29 bucks on a OS that will run circles around the mid ranged Imacs. Specially when this thing is ancient. http://i.imgur.com/lIIzfJh.jpg
 
I had almost all the cpus in this article. All of them overclocked.
But the king for me is my Q6600.
I still run my Q6600 today. I don't find any need to change.
Running @ 3.6Ghz for the last 4.5 Years! Super fast for me.
50% overclock!
 
I have an AMD Phenom II 1090T BE SixCore and it's a beast. it comes stock at 3.2 GHz, and I know it's the higher end line up than the one on the article here but I'd have been throwing a fit if the Phenom II series wasn't up here.
When I was buying it, It was that or an Intel i7 sixcore at 3.33 GHz, but the difference in price was Phenomenal! the Intel was $999 and the AMD $275, I think this was back in 2010 ish. I Know the intel i series uses hyper threading (each CPU acts like 2, almost, but not quite, it's like having 1.5 processors per core). I did a multi-threading test and found my AMD Phenom II x6 ran 12 threads fastest. my Laptops i7 quad core ran 8 threads the fastest, but 6 threads was most efficient, the increase to 8 was negligible. (I used a program a professor at my college came up with, it's pretty simple, using Trig calculations for testing cpu's, also bear in mind the i7 I used was a 2.3 GHz, while my AMD was running at 3.8GHz so the speed had something to do with the threads)

I run at 3.8 GHz pretty easily. I have an Antec 902 case with tons of airflow and it stays in the 40's C range. I could probably go to 4GHz if I OC the NB more (north bridge, connects the CPU to the memory and motherboard etc. if you adjust the CPU clock without adjusting the NB you will eventually wind up failing to overclock because the data backs up at the NB which has a separate clock rate from the CPU.) I read an article that had all you need to know about OCing AMD Phenom II's but lost the link for it after doing a system restore because windows messed up it's boot files, which it seems to do every 3 years 🙁.
I'd recommend going with AMD Phenom II's unless you really have the money to blow on an intel i7 Extreme edition if you wanna do overclocking and such. I'm Looking into getting an AMD FX 8 core though, wonder how that will do.
 
E8200 @ 3.6GHz @ 1.12V (undervolted from the stock 1.2), still working fine with anything i throw at it. The Wolfdale still is one of the best (more recent) chip from Intel.
 
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