4 ms·

2007! I forgot about the pencil trick, but never had a relevant generation of AMD chip to do that to.

by Twirrim 2y ago

dainiusse 2y ago
I did that with duron 600->900mhz, but it was so long ago that I don't remember exact date
- timschmidt 2y ago
  My Duron 600 ran Windows 98 SE at 950mhz, on an Abit motherboard. What ever happened to Abit? Miss those mad geniuses.
  - teruakohatu 2y ago
    They had financial problems and a class action lawsuit against them in early 2000s. The company was sold and then eventually shutdown or folded into the parent.
  - spockz 2y ago
    Those were the times. Unlocking a lot more performance just by tweaking. These days everything is locked down. I suppose this is more efficient. The last time in felt the same awe, although not by my own handiwork, was when I moved to an M1 MacBook and when I installed Fedora on my desktop. Everything was so fast and silent. Really amazing.
    - timschmidt 2y ago
      I feel like a lot of the tweaking features popularized by Abit are now available on any "gamer" board from one of the major manufacturers, Intel and AMD now even make chipsets targeted at that segment, and there are a lot more bins for CPUs these days, most of which come "pre-overclocked" even dynamically so with turbo-boost and the like. The Athlons and Durons of this era had exposed dies, just a few SKUs, no built-in thermal throttling or speed boosting at all, and oversized high-cfm heatsinks and fans felt like a new thing.
    - Panzer04 2y ago
      More like these days everything is already clocked hard by default. There's basically no point overclocking modern unlocked chips, they are already clocked to 90% of their max speed. Compare that to the above example with 600 vs 900 Mhz (50%! faster) Some locked chips are clocked pretty slow, but that's normal segmentation :(
  - jtwaleson 2y ago
    What made them mad geniuses? I saw their equipment from time to time in catalogs but was too young to realize they had some kind of special reputation.
    - timschmidt 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 is a great example. It was the first motherboard to allow the use of two unmodified Intel Celeron processors in dual Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) configuration. Not only did this cost drastically less than purchasing two CPUs certified for SMP from Intel at the time, Celerons of the era were the first Intel chips with on-chip L2 cache which was clocked at the full speed of the CPU as opposed to the off-chip L2 cache's half-CPU clock on the Pentium II. Abit was also one of the first companies to include jumperless overclocking features in the BIOS. If you look close, you can even see the blue thermal sensors Abit placed in the center of the CPU sockets (CPUs had no built-in thermal sensor at the time) which greatly eased overclocking. In short, they made boards that gave you the full range of what was possible, not just what was on the marketing sheet for the CPU.
- xorl 2y ago
  Same! Dad and I did this a few times, got around having to upgrade to get more performance when we could still get much more out of the current system.
- sedatk 2y ago
  I had tried that with Duron 600 but couldn’t overclock it. I don’t remember what went wrong. Maybe the motherboard didn’t support it.
  - AnotherGoodName 2y ago
    The best way to overclock the lower clocked durons was simply to change the fsb in the bios settings. You didn’t really need the pencil trick as they had 100mhz fsbs in an era where 133 was more common.
    - sedatk 2y ago
      I remember doing that on my Athlon XP. Had too much issue with cooling though. (Probably my fault)
- AnotherGoodName 2y ago
  Sure you didn’t just flip the 100->133mhz fsb setting in the motherboard? The low end durons didn’t really need the multiplier changed as they had a 100mhz fsb when the athlon 1000 had a 133mhz fsb and used the same motherboards. You could just flip the bios setting and get that exact stated overlock without the pencil trick.
elric 2y ago
I did the overclocking and overvolting thing (with a pencil) for a bit, but then I became obsessed with silent computers and went the other way: undervolting. Trying to keep it running at the lowest possible voltage without reducing the clock speed too much. Those were fun experiments. Could do passive air cooling when the overclockers were getting into water cooling. Aside from undervolting to reduce cooling needs and thus fan noise, suspending disks on sturby rubber bands greatly reduced vibration noises, same with mounting fans with plastic plugs instead of metal screws. Getting bigger, slower fans also helped a lot. PCs now tend to be pretty quiet these days, but loud fans and rattling still bug me from time to time.
- Daneel_ 2y ago
  I split the difference. I went with an overkill watercooling set up with quietness in mind, just so I could have nearly-passive cooling at high clock speeds. I’m currently using 2x 360x360mm radiators stacked together, with 4x 180mm 300rpm fans. It’s virtually silent yet keeps my CPU and GPU quite cool, even when gaming.
- Aeolos 2y ago
  Word for word the same here. I remember spending hours and hours in the silentpcreview forums looking for the latest and greatest in silent fan technology.
kristopolous 2y ago
I've probably still got one I should throw away. Probably more than one...

2007! I forgot about the pencil trick, but never had a relevant generation of AMD chip to do that to.

dainiusse 2y ago

I did that with duron 600->900mhz, but it was so long ago that I don't remember exact date

timschmidt 2y ago
My Duron 600 ran Windows 98 SE at 950mhz, on an Abit motherboard. What ever happened to Abit? Miss those mad geniuses.
- teruakohatu 2y ago
  They had financial problems and a class action lawsuit against them in early 2000s. The company was sold and then eventually shutdown or folded into the parent.
- spockz 2y ago
  Those were the times. Unlocking a lot more performance just by tweaking. These days everything is locked down. I suppose this is more efficient. The last time in felt the same awe, although not by my own handiwork, was when I moved to an M1 MacBook and when I installed Fedora on my desktop. Everything was so fast and silent. Really amazing.
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    I feel like a lot of the tweaking features popularized by Abit are now available on any "gamer" board from one of the major manufacturers, Intel and AMD now even make chipsets targeted at that segment, and there are a lot more bins for CPUs these days, most of which come "pre-overclocked" even dynamically so with turbo-boost and the like. The Athlons and Durons of this era had exposed dies, just a few SKUs, no built-in thermal throttling or speed boosting at all, and oversized high-cfm heatsinks and fans felt like a new thing.
  - Panzer04 2y ago
    More like these days everything is already clocked hard by default. There's basically no point overclocking modern unlocked chips, they are already clocked to 90% of their max speed. Compare that to the above example with 600 vs 900 Mhz (50%! faster) Some locked chips are clocked pretty slow, but that's normal segmentation :(
- jtwaleson 2y ago
  What made them mad geniuses? I saw their equipment from time to time in catalogs but was too young to realize they had some kind of special reputation.
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 is a great example. It was the first motherboard to allow the use of two unmodified Intel Celeron processors in dual Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) configuration. Not only did this cost drastically less than purchasing two CPUs certified for SMP from Intel at the time, Celerons of the era were the first Intel chips with on-chip L2 cache which was clocked at the full speed of the CPU as opposed to the off-chip L2 cache's half-CPU clock on the Pentium II. Abit was also one of the first companies to include jumperless overclocking features in the BIOS. If you look close, you can even see the blue thermal sensors Abit placed in the center of the CPU sockets (CPUs had no built-in thermal sensor at the time) which greatly eased overclocking. In short, they made boards that gave you the full range of what was possible, not just what was on the marketing sheet for the CPU.
xorl 2y ago
Same! Dad and I did this a few times, got around having to upgrade to get more performance when we could still get much more out of the current system.
sedatk 2y ago
I had tried that with Duron 600 but couldn’t overclock it. I don’t remember what went wrong. Maybe the motherboard didn’t support it.
- AnotherGoodName 2y ago
  The best way to overclock the lower clocked durons was simply to change the fsb in the bios settings. You didn’t really need the pencil trick as they had 100mhz fsbs in an era where 133 was more common.
  - sedatk 2y ago
    I remember doing that on my Athlon XP. Had too much issue with cooling though. (Probably my fault)
AnotherGoodName 2y ago
Sure you didn’t just flip the 100->133mhz fsb setting in the motherboard? The low end durons didn’t really need the multiplier changed as they had a 100mhz fsb when the athlon 1000 had a 133mhz fsb and used the same motherboards. You could just flip the bios setting and get that exact stated overlock without the pencil trick.

elric 2y ago

I did the overclocking and overvolting thing (with a pencil) for a bit, but then I became obsessed with silent computers and went the other way: undervolting. Trying to keep it running at the lowest possible voltage without reducing the clock speed too much. Those were fun experiments. Could do passive air cooling when the overclockers were getting into water cooling. Aside from undervolting to reduce cooling needs and thus fan noise, suspending disks on sturby rubber bands greatly reduced vibration noises, same with mounting fans with plastic plugs instead of metal screws. Getting bigger, slower fans also helped a lot. PCs now tend to be pretty quiet these days, but loud fans and rattling still bug me from time to time.

Daneel_ 2y ago
I split the difference. I went with an overkill watercooling set up with quietness in mind, just so I could have nearly-passive cooling at high clock speeds. I’m currently using 2x 360x360mm radiators stacked together, with 4x 180mm 300rpm fans. It’s virtually silent yet keeps my CPU and GPU quite cool, even when gaming.
Aeolos 2y ago
Word for word the same here. I remember spending hours and hours in the silentpcreview forums looking for the latest and greatest in silent fan technology.

kristopolous 2y ago

I've probably still got one I should throw away. Probably more than one...