Overclocking
Recently I bought a new CPU, motherboard and RAM, and as I’ve been doing for some time set about trying to overclock it. I already knew that it should do well, many of the recent Intel CPUs, including the Q6600, are known for being good clockers.
In the end I settled on 3.5GHz, which is very good for a 2.4GHz processor on air cooling. I could probably push it a bit further, but 3.6GHz on air got a bit too hot so the cooling would need to be improved in that case.
However, this randomly got me wondering (this is what boredom can do to you), what are the best CPUs in terms overclockability I’ve had?
This was fairly easy, as I tend to remember the really good ones (and the really bad ones, as you will see in a moment):
- Intel Pentium 2 Celeron 300MHz @ 450MHz (50%)
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz @ 3.5GHz (45%)
- AMD Opteron 170 (X2) 2.0GHz @ 2.7GHz (35%)
- Intel Pentium 4 Northwood 1.8GHz @ 2.4GHz (33%)
On the opposite end of the scale is the trusty (not) Cyrix M1-PR166+ that I attempted to overclock. Let’s just say it never really recovered and became somewhat temperamental and prone to the occasional spontaneous reboot even at stock speeds.
So there you go. Random blog post FTW. WTG me!