Anyone remember OCing back in the DOS days?

[Uhtrinity]

My overclocking history:

1993 - AMD 386 DX 33 to 40 Mhz with math co processor addon, then later to a Cyrix 486 DLC 40.

1994 - AMD 486 DX2 66 to 80Mhz

1995 - Pentium 90 to 112 Mhz

1996 - Pentium 100 Laptop chip to 160 Mhz on an Intel VX motherboard. Had to do a voltage mod to the voltage regulator. Basically added a Pot so I could adjust the cpu voltage up or down. Made an oversized heatsink by cutting up an audio amplifier heatsink. Moved on to an Asus HX board after I accidently fried the VX board with the same results. Also pushed some Pentium 166 and 200 MMX chips to the 250 Mhz range.

97 - 99 - Experimented with many Celerons, and AMD K6 cpu's including heatsink grounding / Faraday cage experiments.

99 - 2000 - Did the first (or second depending on who you ask) dip switch mod to the Athlon K7's. Soon followed by the GFD (Golden Finger Device). I believe we modded something like 500 K7's, then later a few hundred socketed Thunderbirds and Durons before the market died out. Out of those 500 hardwired K7's we had less than 6 come back for rewiring / fixes. We also went through about 6 motherboards that were used in testing because the Slots wore out. That was a fun time for me
Article on Anandtech

2000 - present - Many Athlons, Athlon XP's, Athlon 64's, and more recently Pentium Dual Core (Core Duo Lite) as in my sig.

Edit: Now I'm interested in hardware hacks to my Insight. I have already done a mima mod, and hope to soon do a bosster battery pack and plugin charging. A full EV conversion could also be in the future.

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: CTho9305

Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
I didn't even know it was possible to OC back in DOS. :Q

Jumpers on the motherboard, or swapping out clock crystals .

My first OC was an 80286 IBM AT, OC'ed from 6 mhz to 9.16. Using the crystal. I still have it I think ! (the crystal)

Edit: And the turbo button was originally so you could run certain software that relied on the clock. There was a game I used to love, and if you didn;t run it at 4.77 mhz, you couldn;t play it, as the screen went too fast to see to play !

 

[Keysplayr]

My parents bought a Tandy TRS-80 in the 80's. And we had a Commodore 64 (if thats what it was called).
My first store bought PC was an IBM PS/2 with a 486 SX25. By the time I maxxed all the upgrades possible for this machine, I believe I had 12MB of RAM and a overdrive processor to bring it to a 486DX4 100. It was pretty quick back then. I hung onto that machine until Pentium 233MMX became affordable for me. and I overclocked that to a measely 266 with jumpers. LOL back then I was like "OMG look how much faster it is!!!" hehehehe. Anyways, the PS/2 came with Windows 3.1. DOS with a candy wrapper more or less.

 

[Martimus]

I still have a folder called "PKWare" for all my compression software, although ARJ got more use than PKZip did for me. I never overclocked my computer back then. My first computer was a Compaq 8088, which had a 10MB hard drive, and two 5 1/4" Floppy Drives. I have no idea what clock speed it ran at. The first computer I overclocked was a K6 233, which I just clocked to 250MHz (I had it at 266MHz, but it wasn't completely stable, so I took it down to 250MHz.) From then on, I bought AMD, because I could get about the same quality processor as Intel for about 1/3 the price. Of course, now Intel processors have come down in price, so I could actually get one and wouldn't feel like a complete idiot for paying too much.

 

[secretanchitman]

all i remember was setting a jumper on the motherboard...pentium 60mhz to a whopping 66mhz. same with my pentium 2 mmx - from 266mhz to 300mhz. that was BLAZING fast at the time.

 

[TheSlamma]

Originally posted by: CTho9305

Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
I didn't even know it was possible to OC back in DOS. :Q

Jumpers on the motherboard, or swapping out clock crystals .

I havent heard that term in atleast 15 years... thanks for the memory.

 

[Nemesis 1]

I only got interested in the enthusist market after I paid $3000 for a Comquake and later found out all I could upgrade was memory. What a reap off.

But I do recall reading about early cpu's that were being rebanded as higher performing Cpu's than they were. It really hurt that companies reputation . Because these rebranded O/C cpus failed alot.

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
I didn't even know it was possible to OC back in DOS. :Q

only larry would remember this... lol

LOL man i remember the crystals, but never had the guts to do it.

Thanks for the flashback. Unfortunately, back then a 386 was probably as expensive as a high end gaming machine in terms of dollars, and i didnt want to fry a computer that expensive back then.

Well more like i dont think i had the resources to replace it back then that i do now.

lol.

 

[Mondoman]

Regarding the crystals, yes, he's serious. A bit of soldering expertise certainly helped...

(sorry for the out-of-order late reply).

Reminds me of the blinding speed of my 2.1MHz Z-80 based Sorcerer :laugh:

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: aigomorla

Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
I didn't even know it was possible to OC back in DOS. :Q

only larry would remember this... lol

LOL man i remember the crystals, but never had the guts to do it.

Thanks for the flashback. Unfortunately, back then a 386 was probably as expensive as a high end gaming machine in terms of dollars, and i didnt want to fry a computer that expensive back then.

Well more like i dont think i had the resources to replace it back then that i do now.

lol.

In the IBM AT I OC'ed from 6 to 9.16, it was not soldered, but a plug in !

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
There was a game I used to love, and if you didn;t run it at 4.77 mhz, you couldn;t play it, as the screen went too fast to see to play !

Wing Commander was like that. Not that low a speed as it required a faster machine, but the game played as fast as the machine. On a really fast machine you can kill the Tiger's Claw quick! Oops, guess we weren't supposed to do that.

Originally posted by: aigomorla
LOL man i remember the crystals, but never had the guts to do it.

I didn't do it myself either. Factory overclocked FTW!

 

[Uhtrinity]

Originally posted by: Mondoman
Regarding the crystals, yes, he's serious. A bit of soldering expertise certainly helped...

(sorry for the out-of-order late reply).

Reminds me of the blinding speed of my 2.1MHz Z-80 based Sorcerer :laugh:

I did a crystal swap on my first 386 motherboard. But the it made the system clock so fast I changed it back the same day.

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: Zap

Originally posted by: Markfw900
There was a game I used to love, and if you didn;t run it at 4.77 mhz, you couldn;t play it, as the screen went too fast to see to play !

Wing Commander was like that. Not that low a speed as it required a faster machine, but the game played as fast as the machine. On a really fast machine you can kill the Tiger's Claw quick! Oops, guess we weren't supposed to do that.

Originally posted by: aigomorla
LOL man i remember the crystals, but never had the guts to do it.

I didn't do it myself either. Factory overclocked FTW!

AHAHAHAHAHA WING COMMANDER OWNED IN THE DAYS!!!

sorry for the caps. yeah i remember when i upgraded to a 486DX66 and tried to play WC without a rate limiter. LOL id crash the plane into something as soon as id leave the claw.

that was a definite OOPS....


LOL remember the sound blaster days also. I thought it was a the coolest thing when they talked the animation scenes using a Sound Blaster! man.... i dont think i get that much enjoyment anymore....

 

[Dadofamunky]

So funny, I'm a n00b because my first OC was a PIII-733 to 850 MHz, ran like a tank for five years... I've built boxes back to the 286-10 days but it never occurred to me to try OCing them.

 

[Netopia]

My first time I didn't call it overclocking because I'd never heard the term. At the time, myself and my brother were the only people I knew with IBM PCs at home (as opposed to work). The machine I had (circa 1986) had a 4.77MHz 8088, 512KB of RAM, dual 5.25" Floppies, a 10MB belt actuated hard drive, and a monochrome display adapter with printer port, 14 inch monochrome amber monitor.

This was before PKZIP, as Phil Katz used the .arc extension . Back then it was arc and arcx as the commands to compress and decompress. Some company (don't remember which) sued him because they used arc as an extension, so he changed it to zip, and the rest is history. That was a long time ago, so I could have it mixed up, but that's what I remember. Sadly, Phil Katz (the PK in PKzip) was an alcoholic who basically drank himself to death just a couple years ago.

I didn't (and don't) have a background in electronics or anything, but I was fascinated by looking inside the beast. One day I noticed what looked like a crystal from my old walkie-talkie and also noticed that the frequency was very near triple the 4.77 MHz of the machine. (note: back in the day, you could get walkie-talkies that would operate on a number 2,3,5,9 whatever... of citizen band radio channels, but you had to buy a crystal of the appropriate frequency for each channel you wanted to use) I started to wonder if it controlled the speed of the machine. I didn't do anything right away, but it kept nagging at me. In the mean time, I heard about this CPU called a NEC V-20 that could replace an 8088 and give better performance. I removed the 8088 and put in the V-20, and sure enough, Norton SI told me I'd gone from a performance rating of 1.0 (stock IBM PC) to 1.2! WOW... 20% just like that! I couldn't really tell a difference in using the machine though.

After a few months, I decided to see what I could do with the crystal. To put this in context, I was making $7.50 an hour and my wife was making something like $10. She was pregnant and was going to stay home and do typesetting work (we had a DESKJET that I talked the guy down to $700 from $1,000!.... changes to the industry came quickly and the business never did much)... back to the story.... long story short, we could NOT afford for me to break this machine and I had no money to replace it... but I simply COULD NOT help myself! (I was addicted to overclocking just from the thought of it, I guess).

I found a crystal that was around 21MHz at Radio Shack. Bought it. Took the whole computer apart, noting on paper where each card when and such. The crystal was soldered to traces on the mobo, so I had to use a soldering iron to melt the solder holding it in, and then solder the new one in place. Did I mention that I had no background in electronics? After a LOT of fear (my wife didn't know what I was doing) I put the machine back together and BINGO! 7MHz!!! I couldn't believe how fast the machine was! I was all giddy like a school girl with her first crush. Then the reality that someone has already mentioned hit... my games didn't work! My favorite game, Digger, would be over before I could really react. That sucked.

I later upgrade that machine with a Paradise (the video arm of Western Digital) EGA+ card, which was unbelievable! I think that particular card could do 256 colors at 640 * 480. I had to buy a monitor to go with it... the monitor was great and went all the way up to 1024 * 768 interlaced. I also bought an Adlib sound card, which to be honest just had musical tones and such (no real sound effects) but it was a start. Then there was the CPU upgrade that plugged into the ISA slot. I think it was by ATI, but can't remember. It was called the "Tiny Turbo 286". Man! I think I had 10MHz of 286 goodness, but after many calls to the company, it appeared that if I used that upgrade, I could only use 16 colors at 640* 350, as the upgrade and my video card both wanted the same registers. SUCK!

Other upgrades on that machine included moving from MFM (modified frequency modulation) drives to RLL (run length limited) drive of 32MB and then 65MB in size. Those two drives cost me over $700! I also bought an 8087 math co-processor that made no difference to anything but my CAD program, but it changed redrawing a floor layout from a ~3-5 minute wait to about 3-5 SECOND wait! I couldn't believe that it was real! In the end, that machine (with a different mobo) had 1MB of RAM with 3MB on an EMS (expanded memory system) card (used as a RAM disk), CPU at 10MHz, almost 100MB of drive space... it lasted me a good 4-5 years. I jumped straight to a 386SX-16 (SX=no math copossessor)... I overclocked it, and just about every system I've touched since then... and absolutely every system I've owned!

With Video, I remember getting my first "real" VGA card. Then, years later moving to a VLB slot card (the STB Horizon) then through the myriad of PCI cards and AGP cards. I don't game as much any longer, so I'm not trying to stay cutting edge. The machine I use to play games on still has an AGP 7600GT (overclocked, of course!). I do have one PCIe card, a 7300GT, but I use it in one of my Linux boxen that I don't do any gaming on.

One question on the hard drives.... anyone remember when in order to initialize a hard drive you had to go into debug and type "c=g800:5" before you could use fdisk or format it? Does anyone else remember how hard drives were always BIGGER than advertised because they knew there were going to be many bad sectors, so they made them oversized so you would end up with at least the advertised size? That 30MB I mentioned above actually had over 32MB of usable space... SCORE!

Joe

 

[Modelworks]

overclocked a tandy color computer , 6809 cpu , doubled the clock speed from .89 to 1.78mhz.
Amazingly fast for the time

 

[Uhtrinity]

I was a relative late bloomer when I bought my first pc in 93, but with my electronics background I jumped into the case in the first week. Outside of the overclocking I had upgraded the memory from 512kb to 4 megs within 2 months. Bought a Paradise video card at Sam's Club(VGA I believe), added the math co processor, then soon after upgraded to the 486 DLC chip (386 with l1 cache). I even upgraded the 40 Mb HD with a 250 MB WD which cost $250. At the time I was playing Star Wars Xwing, as well as some demos I had downloaded from BBSs. From there it was a continual progression.

It around 97 when Anand starting publishing his first articles, I believe they were about the K6 and the Voodoo 1's which was my first leap into 3d with Quake. Later he did articles on the Voodoo 2 in SLI mode. That was the same time I started OCing video cards.

 

[jjmIII]

My oldest OC:

200mmx @ 300

It was on a newer "Super Socket 7" board with pc100 sticks, and a huge Socket 7/370 Copper HSF.

 

[rudder]

Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
I didn't even know it was possible to OC back in DOS. :Q

I could not imagine the rush of going grom 12mhz to 14.5mhz. Leisure larry framerates would be off the board.

 

[bigpow]

Brings back a lot of good memories...


BTW, I still think that a Turbo button is a cool thing to have.
Especially without having to reboot the machine (on-the-fly speed toggle)

Why can't they make it for today's PC?

 

[Netopia]

The Turbo button was really a "Put on the brakes" button renamed. If you had a 16MHz machine, it was that speed with the button pushed. Push the button again and it may slow your machine down to 12MHz. Turbo definitely sounds better than Retard as a marketing point!

Joe

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: bigpow
Brings back a lot of good memories...


BTW, I still think that a Turbo button is a cool thing to have.
Especially without having to reboot the machine (on-the-fly speed toggle)

Why can't they make it for today's PC?

its called speedstep. Or cool n quiet on AMD's.

 

[Munky]

My first OC was a TI-85 calculator, went from 6mhz to 18mhz by unsoldering a capacitor. Then all the games ran too fast to be playable. On the computer side, I only started it with my Athlon XP, went from 1.53ghz to about 1.8 with stock air cooloing.

 

[Avalon]

Hmmm, I've got a working Packard Bell 386 in front of me that I'm playing Monopoly off a 5 and a quarter with
I wonder if I can do anything with it...

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: Avalon
Hmmm, I've got a working Packard Bell 386 in front of me that I'm playing Monopoly off a 5 and a quarter with
I wonder if I can do anything with it...

donate it to the smithsonian as an antique paper weight.

Seriously PDA's are faster then that now. My ATT Hermes 8525 would give it a run for its life.