14 Of The Most Legendary Overclocking-Friendly CPUs

[egilbe]

I've had almost every chip mentioned and overclocked all of them from the Pentium 166mmx to the current 2500k I'm running at 4.0 on air, now. I enjoyed the trip down memory lane. It even had me scrounging for the HSF I bought for the Celeron 300A I bought and kept after I got rid of the computer.

 

[jitpublisher]

Ah yes. Still have the old Celeron 300A running on an Abit BH6 @450mhz sitting out in the shop. Don't use it anymore, but you can plug it in and boot up Win 98 anytime you want. I don't remember right off the top of my head what else is in the old rig, but I'll never give it up!

 

[wavetrex]

How could you forget about the Core2 Duo E4300??

A 1.8Ghz model, dirt cheap, which went to 3.2Ghz EASY, sometimes even more.
Some people managed to hit 3.7Ghz with that baby using water cooling, making it a +105% overclock, the highest ever in the history of all CPUs.

 

[markthema3]

Still have my E8000 desktop, though it's getting to where I'm considering upgrading it to a sandy bridge (why go ivy or haswell when sandy is just as fast?).

 

[RedJaron]

Still have my E8000 desktop, though it's getting to where I'm considering upgrading it to a sandy bridge (why go ivy or haswell when sandy is just as fast?).

Don't forget IB ( and I think HW ) have additional instruction sets supported and a few more features in the chipset ( and in IB's favor, a marked power efficiency improvement. HW might be a little more expensive than it's worth right now, but I can't think of many reasons to get SB over IB at this point.

 

[grandleaf]

I have had C300A

 

[IInuyasha74]

It would have been good for someone to type a little background history with these pictures. Some of these are hard to tell what they are, let alone know anything about if you are a bit younger. I hope Athlon 64 is in here. They overclocked sometimes 600mhz or better. Being they were only 2 or 2.2GHz usually, thats quite a jump.

 

[noobnerd]

My 1st build was a pentium D 805 on a asus p5wd2-e premium mobo. Its still running strong at a modest 3.5GHz oc on air. money well spent! 😀

 

[steveagain]

I have an AMD 645 3.1Ghz running at 3.92Ghz with stock cooling and she peaks out underload at 57c

 

[gsxrme]

Ive been very happy with my 2600k running at 5.1ghz, hyper-junk disabled and 16GB gskill 2200mhz cas7 setup. After seeing ivy and haswell release, I have no plans to upgrade anytime soon.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

If you don't want hyperthreading, why get an i7?

There is a moderate advantage to it though in many workloads. Games are starting to use more than 4 threads slowly too.

 

[tiggers97]

What about the AMD 3000+?

 

[jitpublisher]

While there have been many CPU's over the years that overclock well, and given the right cooling, an experienced builder can get impressive numbers from just about anything. However, I think some of us are straying from the point of the article, which is "legendary" CPU's. I don't really think there has been any single processor in last 8 years that I would deem as 'legendary". In time, maybe the i5 and i7. Although they are modern processors, they are king of the desktop world and most people can afford them. Maybe 10 years from now, they will be on someone's "legendary" list.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Not really. You wouldn't name an i3 legendary, because it can go about 7%.

I'd put it as an arbitrary value of about a 50%+ improvement - e.g. being able to take a 2Ghz C2D to 3GHz, or a 2500K from 3.3Ghz to around 5. Though you do have the paradox of the heap.

Being king does not require OC wonders.

 

[Chloe_May]

am-486 dx2 66 that chip could do 75mhz easily and 100 with a bit of effort (playing with various jumpers, adding a fan etc).
The chip came stocl passively cooled, but adding a fan was a common mod. the tricky part was getting good enough ram and getting yer vlb card and other peripherals to accept a higher bus speed.
oddly enough that problem continued until socket 939, when finally nearly all motherboards regardless of pricebin could lock pci/agp or pci/pcie clocks)

we all remember the celery 300A I had mine stable @466 and later 500 when I found unofficial pc150 sdram.
still running today, running 98se with a ati rage pro trubo 128
but the dx2 486's were good ocers for their day, it was just a different flavor of 'game' back then.

Another noteworthy chip is the k62 266 that chip would do 400 easily with a good super7 board and pc100 ram. needed a lot of cooling though but it ran win95c and mechwarrior 2 mercs like it was nothing.

 

[egilbe]

am-486 dx2 66 that chip could do 75mhz easily and 100 with a bit of effort (playing with various jumpers, adding a fan etc).
The chip came stocl passively cooled, but adding a fan was a common mod. the tricky part was getting good enough ram and getting yer vlb card and other peripherals to accept a higher bus speed.
oddly enough that problem continued until socket 939, when finally nearly all motherboards regardless of pricebin could lock pci/agp or pci/pcie clocks)

we all remember the celery 300A I had mine stable @466 and later 500 when I found unofficial pc150 sdram.
still running today, running 98se with a ati rage pro trubo 128
but the dx2 486's were good ocers for their day, it was just a different flavor of 'game' back then.

Another noteworthy chip is the k62 266 that chip would do 400 easily with a good super7 board and pc100 ram. needed a lot of cooling though but it ran win95c and mechwarrior 2 mercs like it was nothing.

You'll find my screen name in the credits of MW2 Mercenaries 16 bit version.

 

[Chloe_May]

haha nice mechwarrior 2 mercs was what really got me into the whole mechwarrior/battletech game, and pc gaming in general.
gonna have to pull the old k6-2 out of storage and play through a few times so I dont get out of practice.
assuming the quantum bigfoot 4.01gb hdd hasn't lost its format in the 6 months since the last time i fired it up.

 

[jitpublisher]

am-486 dx2 66 that chip could do 75mhz easily and 100 with a bit of effort (playing with various jumpers, adding a fan etc).
The chip came stocl passively cooled, but adding a fan was a common mod. the tricky part was getting good enough ram and getting yer vlb card and other peripherals to accept a higher bus speed.
oddly enough that problem continued until socket 939, when finally nearly all motherboards regardless of pricebin could lock pci/agp or pci/pcie clocks)

we all remember the celery 300A I had mine stable @466 and later 500 when I found unofficial pc150 sdram.
still running today, running 98se with a ati rage pro trubo 128
but the dx2 486's were good ocers for their day, it was just a different flavor of 'game' back then.

Another noteworthy chip is the k62 266 that chip would do 400 easily with a good super7 board and pc100 ram. needed a lot of cooling though but it ran win95c and mechwarrior 2 mercs like it was nothing.

Ah, Mechwarrior, how many hours did I spend playing the original? Too many! I remember my friends both had DX2-66mhz "overdrive" processors in their PC, then I was in Best Buy one day and saw the brand new Intel 100mhz DX4 overdrive processor, (mine was the 33x3 verison) bought it, rushed home and popped it into my 33DX machine, BAM! Instantly I was waxing the floor with them in Mechwarrior, Doom, and Nascar! That was probably the biggest single noticeable speed upgrade that I have ever seen in any PC I ever owned. It was simply amazing. My board had buss settings of 33, 40, and 50mhz. I could bump the buss to 40 and get 120 mhz out of it, and everything worked fine. It got pretty warm though, as it was passively cooled. So I ran it most of the time @100mhz.

 

[Chrisu_PL]

Well, I had Celeron 800, stable running 1200MHz. POST at 1320 MHz (unfortunatelly HDD controller at Abit ST6-R was not able to run with so high PCI frequency)

 

[Pherule]

There is only one king of overclicking. The i5 2500K is it.

 

[jitpublisher]

Yeah but an i2500 is not a "legendary" cpu. Its a version of a modern family of cpus that are all capable of overclocking quite well. Only time will tell if it can be elevated to legendary status, but I doubt it ever will. It was a cpu whos time had come, nothing special about it. It was almost expected.

 

[lbpsfl]

I OC'ed the Celeron 300 and the Barton. Bought the Intel Q6600, but did the computation & it seemed that I was just paying money to the power company vice Intel. (And I stopped doing BOINC.) OC was fun, but is it truly economical with the modern Intel & AMD chips?

 

[The Q6660 Inside]

I OC'ed the Celeron 300 and the Barton. Bought the Intel Q6600, but did the computation & it seemed that I was just paying money to the power company vice Intel. (And I stopped doing BOINC.) OC was fun, but is it truly economical with the modern Intel & AMD chips?

For $5 on your power bill, LOLYES!