Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The History of CPU Overclocking”.
These days, the process of artificially boosting your processors performance is really quite straightforward. Many motherboards offer a one-click OC of some sort and for those who want to get their hands dirty err. The most that’s often required is a quick boost to the speed and the voltage in your BIOS settings, which takes all of five minutes, plus the subsequent stress testing, but, like so many other things in life, this process used to be much more involved in the past. Overclocking didn’t begin with modern gamers trying to squeeze a few more frames per second out of the crisis games, but rather overclocked consumer CPUs actually first hit the scene all the way back in the mid-1980s.
That’S right not long after the original IBM, PC started, making its way into homes and offices, the first widespread overclocked consumer CPU. Wasn’T some fancy unlocked model that Intel marketed to gamers, but rather it was the humble 8088 the same chip that was at the heart of the IBM PC, because the original PC was relatively easy for other manufacturers to clone. They tried to set their machines apart by jacking up the CPU speed by over twice as much I mean granted.
This was just from four point, seven to ten megahertz, but come on it’s the mid-1980s, and this wasn’t just a matter of the manufacturer. Changing a few BIOS settings before shipping, the computers out for sale. Instead, they actually had to physically change out the crystal oscillator that dictated what the clock speed would be.
So if you don’t know what a crystal oscillator is, it’s a little chunk of material, often quartz, that vibrates at a certain resonance to synchronize an electrical circuit. This is the same reason that you often see analog, watches and clocks that feature quartz movement messing with the crystal oscillator was not only more laborious than modern overclocking. It was also far less stable, so you know how, in modern times it’s common to change the CPU multiplier. If you want a speed boost, but you typically leave the base clock alone. Well, that’s because the base clock controls how other components in your system, sync up with the CPU having a multiplier lets. You crank up the processor without interfering with your other stuff, but back then, while there was no such thing as multiplier overclocking, so getting other parts of your system to play nicely at over double the speed was often a huge problem, but even after multiplier, overclocking came Along in 1989, as part of Intel’s famous 486 processor, changing that multiplier was still a bit of a pain.
Doing it in firmware wasn’t quite a thing yet so enthusiasts had to adjust jumpers, do their own soldering or even use conductive pencils to draw traces of sorts between nodes. That would tell the CPU to run faster. The pain of having to do all of this by hand, plus the relative expense of CPUs kept overclocking a niche hobby for several more years, but in the mid to late 2000s processors became cheaper and better aftermarket cooling solutions started becoming more widespread. Furthermore, it was around this time that the extreme enthusiast overclocking scene, that we know today started to take off CPU clock speeds were growing by leaps and bounds even out of the box, and people got excited at the prospect of chasing ever higher speeds and smashing World Records with setups involving liquid, nitrogen and other exotic cooling methods, it also didn’t hurt that this was around the time that the internet was really starting to catch on and as such, a relatively new community of overclocking hobbyists formed in a short time span. Then, in the early 2000s biases that allowed the user to regulate how much voltage was hitting the CPU as well as directly controlled, the multiplier started coming out thanks to new AMD and Intel chipsets, making overclocking both easier for enthusiasts and accessible to novices.
This led to not only the proliferation of overclocking competitions that were getting lots of attention in technology publications, but also to Intel and AMD openly marketing unlocked CPUs with K and X in the creating an unlocked model on the Intel side, though, of course they didn’t and Still don’t to this day officially support it as they don’t want to be responsible for thousands of questionable warranty claims. With that said, you can buy extra coverage if you’d, like, as for the current day, the design of modern motherboards has gotten us to the point where you don’t even need a super exotic model in order to get a decent overclock. With that said, many manufacturers Intel AMD and even on the GPU side, Nvidia are shipping their silicon so close to the redline that there’s not a ton of overclocking Headroom left, at least when we compare to the days of old and it’s for that reason, as well As others that there are plenty of purists who yearn for the good old days of overclocking and having to physically tinker with the chip or the motherboard as for me, I don’t actually mind being able to set it and forget it. So I have time to pursue my other hobbies if you’re interested to learn more about what it takes to overclock head to WWN Telkom, slash gaming, where they’re building out a bunch of educational resources for PC gaming and hardware from learning how to build a PC to Tips on overclocking to how to get the most out of your game streaming.
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