The plus side to overclocking old hardware...

[NTMBK]

Is that it's cheap to replace it when you kill it

Should have guessed that messing around with OC'ing my Phenom II 960T on a crappy old AM2 motherboard with 3-and-a-bit power phases was a bad idea. The lack of any sort of manual voltage control in the BIOS was probably the biggest hint. "I'll just push the clock a little to 3.4GHz, should be safe right?" Upon booting into Windows and firing up Prime, I discover that it's pushing almost 1.6V through my CPU. Oddly enough, it's now no longer stable at stock frequencies, even on a much nicer Asus board. As soon as the Turbo clock kicked in the entire system would just hang, even when I give it extra voltage. Sigh.

Lesson learned, and a replacement 965 from eBay is in the post... Glad I fried a 4 year old CPU, and not a brand new $1000 8 core Haswell monster.

What's the first CPU you all killed?

 

[DrMrLordX]

Not a 960T! That thing might have unlocked. Le sigh.

First CPU I truly killed was my Athlon II x4 635 that got nickel and copper shavings on the pins from excessive lapping. It was then that I learned why it is unnecessary/undesirable to relap a processor that has been stained by CLU.

 

[Abwx]

Your MB support the X6, that would had been quite an upgrade...

 

[NTMBK]

Your MB support the X6, that would had been quite an upgrade...

True, but I don't think I could justify the extra heat... not to mention the good ones still fetch a high price on eBay!

 

[Lepton87]

I killed just one CPU but I reached the height of stupidity in the way I did it. I placed a peltier on a cooler with an UNMODIFIED mounting system. The extra height obviously chipped its unprotected K7 die. It was T-Bird 1.4GHz notorious at the time for its power consumption so placing a peltier on it was a bad idea in the first place. It was dark ages when it comes to cooling, heat-pipes weren't there yet, the first cooler with heat pipes I had was Thermal right XP90 on a X2 3800+ it was a quantum leap in coolers. Anyone remembers XP 90 and 120?

 

[Idontcare]

What's the first CPU you all killed?

First? For me that would be a craptastic 486 processor (either TI or Cyrix brand) that I thought would be nice to OC since I already bought an upgrade and was ready to toss the old one (back in the day when you could double or triple your CPU performance with a single upgrade).

I did something that released the smoke. Oops.

 

[crashtech]

Obviously I have not been trying hard enough.

 

[jhu]

Is that it's cheap to replace it when you kill it

Should have guessed that messing around with OC'ing my Phenom II 960T on a crappy old AM2 motherboard with 3-and-a-bit power phases was a bad idea. The lack of any sort of manual voltage control in the BIOS was probably the biggest hint. "I'll just push the clock a little to 3.4GHz, should be safe right?" Upon booting into Windows and firing up Prime, I discover that it's pushing almost 1.6V through my CPU. Oddly enough, it's now no longer stable at stock frequencies, even on a much nicer Asus board. As soon as the Turbo clock kicked in the entire system would just hang, even when I give it extra voltage. Sigh.

Lesson learned, and a replacement 965 from eBay is in the post... Glad I fried a 4 year old CPU, and not a brand new $1000 8 core Haswell monster.

What's the first CPU you all killed?

Lol, poor people... Back in my day, we overclocked our IBM PCs to 9.4 MHz and if it died, that was $5k down the drain. And we liked it!

 

[NTMBK]

Lol, poor people... Back in my day, we overclocked our IBM PCs to 9.4 MHz and if it died, that was $5k down the drain. And we liked it!

Please tell me that didn't happen often!

 

[Deders]

I did something that released the smoke. Oops.

Not the precious smoke, How's a CPU supposed ot work if it doesn't have all it's smoke?

 

[ShintaiDK]

You can just refill the magic smoke for resumed operation.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/10622

 

[jhu]

Not the precious smoke, How's a CPU supposed ot work if it doesn't have all it's smoke?

Maybe it wasn't really smoke