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This comment made me nod my head in agreement, laugh and also experience a wave of nostalgia. All at once.

I once overclocked one with a pencil. Just connected the solder points between some leads on the CPU package.

Seems to have been a fairly common trick with the Durons. I sadly never experienced the rush of trying it mostly because Athlons and PIIIs were all I'd ever played with when the 1ghz chips started coming out, but this was probably what made the Durons so attractive to student hackers. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=840954

Tangent: I love that I can pull up forum threads from two decades ago.

I remember when I got my first free 1ghz PIII machine in high school. This was like 2009. Huge difference from my 450mhz PIII machine.

Ah! Athlons. My overclocking journey picked up when I built a DIY watercooler out of a bent 5mm cooper sheet (at which thickness you stop calling it "sheet"?) polished to a mirror finish. At some point, during the peak of easter european winter I kept the heat exchanger outside in the -20*C temperatures!

I remember doing this too, it unlocked the multiplier which they locked at the factory by slicing through some metal blocks with a laser. My Duron 600 would run at 800 with a normal cooler & fan, then I added a really loud Delta fan and a copper heatsink and it was stable at a magical 1Ghz. Eventually I got cocky enough to solder a resistor between a certain pin on the motherboard and earth which effectively increased all the voltage settings in the BIOS so I could push enough voltage through it to run at 1.2Ghz - it ran like this for years as my only PC. Good times :)

luuuucky. i only got the k6 :O

I had a K6-233 which was always on the verge of overheating (or maybe I was obsessing a bit too much about monitoring it). I envied my friend's K6-200, which was more stable it seemed.

My K6-233 got so hot it demagnetized its CPU fan. I noticed after the floating point unit fried the first time I tried to play some post-quake FPS.

After that, it would boot, but the antivirus software I was running said it had a virus. I guess that was the only msdos program in the boot sequence that performed floating point.

I had a K6-II which I put a big heatsink and large fan on (had to ghetto mod the mounting), sawed a 120mm hole in the case just above the cpu and put another fan there. It overclocked handsomely and stable after that. I don't remember the exact frequencies but I think it was 266MHz stock and clocked close to 400MHz with some modifications.

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