When did you catch "the overclocking bug"?

[ahimoth]

Hey so, I'm not sure if this topic has been brought up before. I'm just curious about when people first sort of got obsessed with overclocking. Was it right away or did it take some time?

In weightlifting we always speak about getting bit by "the Iron bug" the first time you lift some heavy ass weight and never look back. Well what's your story about overclocking?

For me, it's like I just love the numbers, I mainly play League of Legends so my OC is just an arbitrary number it doesn't matter and doesn't effect my game at all. I spent all night overclocking my CPU until I could get it to 4.8 ghz I didn't even care that in stress tests it got to 90 degrees. I'm so excited for getting another computer just so I can try and OC the CPU to that magic 5 ghz.

Suddenly I want to buy a test bench and purchase motherboards not based off of their "gaming" features but purely on what I can overclock the best on.

So please, share your stories with me! xD

Cheers.

 

[SeekaX]

To be honest i overclocked my first CPU because i needed extra performance, if the overclock isn't necessary i avoid it now because it's time consuming and decreases the life expectancy of the CPU. I haven't even touched the overclocking tab yet on my MPOWER board, i should probably look into undervolting.

 

[Wraith]

Way back in 1998 I overclocked my first CPU I didn't really need to I just did it because I could, I pushed my Pentium II 333Mhz to 440Mhz she was a real beast.
PII 333Mhz
256Mb Ram
Dual 3DFX Voodoo Banshees (12MB)
SB Awe64 Gold soundcard

 

[Damien c]

The first cpu I overclocked was a old AMD one with a pencil, but then I stopped playing around and just ran them at stock until I got a Intel Q6600.

I was only a kid when I first started with pc's, but thanks to my dad I enjoyed it and stuck with it.

 

[Mysterae]

So long ago.... I still have my GFD (Gold Finger Device) for my AMD Athlon kicking around somewhere.

I don't think I ever did overclock my Pentium 75 ....

 

[metalgun2000]

I first started a couple of years ago. When I bought the FX 8320. On that system, I did see a game performance increase with the an OC of 4.6ghz but it was only roughly 5% across the board. The main reason I did it was to make the system quicker and more responsive with just everyday stuff. That made a pretty hefty difference compared to default clocks especially at boot-up. I miss the enjoyment I got from OC'ing that system which was just base clock OC. I didn't touch the CPU multi, the CPU hated when I touch the multi.

 

[MacLeod]

I started back in 2009 when I built my first PC with a Athlon X2 7750. Been hooked ever since.

 

[barnsley]

I only catch it when I lag/start to get let down by my cpu unreasonably. I wacked the current 4ghz on my chip as I can do that on stock volts. I prefer overclocking the GPU as games aren't that cpu intensive anymore, although it looks like it might change.

 

[Zoot]

My first taste of overclocking was overclocking an AMD Sempron 2600+ from its stock 1.6GHz to 2.4GHz on an old nForce motherboard back in 2005 or so. I did the same to the Intel Q9450 I had after that, got it up to 3.9GHz. Same with my Phenom II X4 955 which is still kicking in my secondary rig, that managed 3.9GHz. I've managed an overclock of 5.2GHz with my FX-8350 too.

Although in all cases except the Sempron, they were only overclocks for the sake of it - I never ran them 24/7 for the reason that I found overclocking the CPU in each case not really worth it - the performance at stock was more than enough.

These days I don't overclock at all really. I'll do a max overclock just to see what I can get, and then validate it, but after that I'll run the CPU at its stock frequency for as long as I have it.

 

[Fringie]

When I started building my PC last year. As soon as I had the option to OC I did . I probably had the overclocking bug before I even started overclocking, I had seen all these videos from TTL/LTT/TekSyn and so on which made me want to xD.
I don't really care about getting the highest end products and if needed I have no problem under-clocking (assuming the performance isn't turned to poo) but it doesn't feel right if the component isn't running at the performance it can run at (I'd opt for silence over performance though).