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these days the process of artificially boosting your processor's performance is

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really quite straightforward many motherboards offer a one-click oc of

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some sort and for those who want to get their hands dirtier the most that's

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often required is a quick boost to the speed and the voltage in your bio

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settings which takes all of five minutes plus the subsequent stress

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testing but like so many other things in

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life this process used to be much more

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involved in the past overclocking didn't begin with modern

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gamers trying to squeeze a few more frames per second out of the crisis

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games but rather overclocked consumer

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cpus actually first hit the scene all the way back in the

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mid-1980s that's right not long after the original

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ibm pc started making its way into homes and offices

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the first widespread overclocked consumer CPU wasn't some fancy unlocked

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model that Intel marketed to gamers but rather it was the humble 8088 the same

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chip that was at the heart of the ibm pc because the original pc was relatively

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easy for other manufacturers to clone they tried to set their machines apart

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by jacking up the CPU speed by over

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twice as much i mean granted this was just from 4.7 to

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10 megahertz but come on it's the mid

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1980s and this wasn't just a matter of

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the manufacturer changing a few bio settings before

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shipping the computers out for sale instead they actually had to physically

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change out the crystal oscillator that dictated what the clock speed would be

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so if you don't know what a crystal oscillator is it's a little chunk of

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material often quartz that vibrates at a

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certain resonance to synchronize an electrical circuit this is the same

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reason that you often see analog watches and clocks that feature quartz movement

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messing with the crystal oscillator was not only more laborious than modern

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overclocking it was also far less stable

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so you know how in modern times it's common to change the CPU multiplier if

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you want a speed boost but you typically leave the base clock alone well that's

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because the base clock controls how other components in your system sync up

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with the CPU having a multiplier lets you crank up

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the processor without interfering with your other stuff but back then well

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there was no such thing as multiplier overclocking so getting other parts of

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your system to play nicely at over double the speed was often a huge

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problem but even after multiplier overclocking came along in 1989 as part

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of Intel's famous 486 processor changing

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that multiplier was still a bit of a pain doing it in firmware wasn't quite a

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thing yet so enthusiasts had to adjust jumpers do their own soldering or even

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use conductive pencils to draw traces of

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sorts between nodes that would tell the CPU to run faster the pain of having to

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do all of this by hand plus the relative expensive cpus kept overclocking a niche

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hobby for several more years but in the mid to late 2000s processors became

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cheaper and better aftermarket cooling solutions started becoming more

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widespread furthermore it was around this time that

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the extreme enthusiast overclocking scene that we know today started to take

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off CPU clock speeds were growing by leaps and bounds even out of the box and

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people got excited at the prospect of chasing ever higher speeds and smashing

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world records with setups involving liquid nitrogen and other exotic cooling

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methods it also didn't hurt that this was around the time that the internet was really

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starting to catch on and as such a relatively new community of overclocking

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hobbyists formed in a short time span then in the early 2000s biosas that

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allowed the user to regulate how much voltage was hitting the CPU as well as

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directly controlled the multiplier started coming out thanks to new AMD and

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Intel chipsets making overclocking both easier for enthusiasts and accessible to

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novices this led to not only the proliferation

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of overclocking competitions that were getting lots of attention in technology

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publications but also to Intel and AMD

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openly marketing unlocked cpus with k

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and x indicating an unlocked model on the Intel side

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though of course they didn't and still don't to this day officially support it

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as they don't want to be responsible for thousands of questionable warranty

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claims with that said you can buy extra coverage if you'd like as for the

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current day the design of modern motherboards has gotten us to the point

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where you don't even need a super exotic model in order to get a decent overclock

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with that said many manufacturers Intel

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AMD and even on the GPU side NVIDIA are

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shipping their silicon so close to the red line that there's not a ton of

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overclocking headroom left at least when we compare to the days of old and it's

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for that reason as well as others that there are plenty of purists who yearn

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for the good old days of overclocking and having to physically tinker with the

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chip or the motherboard as for me i don't actually mind being

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able to set it and forget it so i have time to pursue my other hobbies

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if you're interested to learn more about what it takes to overclock head to

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www.Intel.com gaming where they're building out a

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bunch of educational resources for pc gaming and hardware from learning how to

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build a pc to tips on overclocking to how to get the most out of your game

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streaming Intel's got you covered so check it out today at the linked below

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so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos and don't

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forget to subscribe to techwiki so you don't miss any of our upcoming videos it

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could even be one suggested by you if you take the time to leave a comment

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suggesting a video topic for the future

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ran out of air there