You’ve got your “mainstream” buyers, your “enthusiasts,” “gamers,” and “overclockers.” Individual products are built to appeal specifically to each of these segments. The real kiss of death had to be when “overclockers” cooled and hardened into one of the handful of terms used by product marketing people to describe the PC market.
Over time, even Intel and AMD got into the act, creating “overclockable” versions of their chips with unlocked multipliers, available for a slight price premium. Meanwhile, overclocking became a competitive endeavor, complete with world records, celebrity practitioners, and corporate sponsors. Companies introduced “overclocked in the box” video cards, which weren’t overclocked at all but borrowed the word shamelessly. Specific products became tailored for overclocking, especially motherboards. I know how strange it sounds to hear that a quirky practice, something people do, could succumb to the allure of fame and fortune, but somehow, that’s what happened. Somewhere between then and now, overclocking sold out. The “free” extra speed was one advantage of having built your own box. As a result, a great many PC DIYers overclocked their systems. Those were dark days.īack then, we truly needed more speed in the worst way, and overclocking was a means of obtaining what you couldn’t buy-either because it was too expensive or just couldn’t be purchased.
Yes, you could feel the speed difference in a mail client. For, uh, making Outlook Express feel extra snappy. For pushing higher frame rates in QuakeWorld. Raising the clock speed from 300 to 450 MHz meant 50% more oomph for, you know, decompressing those JPEGs that really fly down the pipe over a V.90 modem. None of it slowed us down, of course, because PC enthusiasts saw a chance to grab more of that sweet, sweet computing power essentially for free. CPU makers talked about the voiding of warranties and, worse, warned ominously of the dangers of electromigration ending your chip’s life early. Sure, what we were doing wasn’t technically illegal, but you’d think it might have been, given how some folks reacted.
Those of us who dared to violate the specs on our processors were viewed with suspicion by our peers and those in the PC industry alike. Back when we first started experimenting on Celerons, CPU performance was a scarce and precious resource, doled out in small increments for hundreds of dollars each. Like lots of things in personal computing, overclocking has progressed mightily since its early days.
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