these days the process of artificially boosting your processor's performance is
really quite straightforward many motherboards offer a one-click oc of
some sort and for those who want to get their hands dirtier the most that's
often required is a quick boost to the speed and the voltage in your bio
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 4.7 to
10 megahertz but come on it's the mid
1980s and this wasn't just a matter of
the manufacturer changing a few bio 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 well
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 expensive 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 biosas 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 indicating 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 red line 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
www.Intel.com 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 Intel's got you covered so check it out today at the linked below
so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos and don't
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