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Comment by froggertoaster | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this service came several years too late. The overclocking community seemed much bigger 10-15 years ago.

AMD and Intel have gotten much better at pushing the stock CPU frequencies up to the actual process limits as compared to 10 years ago. Also the various Turbo boost features now automatically push it even further towards the limits when there is thermal headroom. Therefore, there is hardly very much headroom left on the table anymore for overclockers.

In 2009 I overclocked my i7 920 from 2.66GHz stock to 4.2GHz fully stable with custom water-cooling. More recently I have used i7 7700k and Ryzen 5950X under custom water-cooling and manual overclocking gets you less than 10% at most. Hardly even worth it. Just keep the CPU cool and let the built in boost features work.

There’s also the issue that newer cores run much hotter than ever before. The chiplets in my new Ryzen 7 5800X are so small that even my custom water loop can only do so much with the temperatures as there just isn’t enough surface area for thermal transfer. I was honestly worried that I was repeatedly messed up the mount of the CPU block, thermal paste application, or that one or both were just bad when I fired up HWInfo64 and did a burn-in test; my old Ryzen 5 1600X didn’t get near as hot on a 240MM AIO when overclocked as the 5800X does doing normal boosting on a 360+240mm custom loop.

>The overclocking community seemed much bigger 10-15 years ago.

Now you're making me nostalgic. 10-15 years ago was both my teenage years and the end of the overclocking golden era. I remember overclocking the living shit out of all kinds of Core2 stuff without anything except a stock cooler and a modest voltage bump that was still within Intel's "safe" recommendations.

One of the best gains was with an E5200 I spend around $120 on brand new. Bumped that up from 2.5GHz to 3.8GHz and the performance was closer to a then-$300 E8400 than the low end Pentium I'd purchased.

The last CPU I overclocked was an i7 2600k, which was my daily driver until last year (!!!).

On one hand, I miss that crazy era, but on the other hand I understand why it had to go away. Intel just don't have the sheer performance advantage to be able to gimp their own chips like that any more.

Edit: Just remembered some of the gimping AMD did, like the HD 6950 that could be upgraded to a 6970 with nothing but a BIOS flash, and the "3-core" Phenoms with a 4th core that could be unlocked in the BIOS.

I miss the era of the Celeron 300 mhz overclocked to 450 mhz. Was a time of rapid change.

Yeah, it was such an easy overclock, too, bumping the frontside bus from 66 MHz to 100 MHz. And suddenly your budget chip could hang with much, much more expensive chips.

My first Pentium I drilled a hole in and still have in my keychain.

I also remember buying a cheaper GPU from ATi, because the rumor was that it was a binned high-end GPU with very little defects that was only soft-locked. Worked like a charm.

How about 20 years ago? Remember the Celeron 300 MHz which could be easily overclocked +50%(!) to 450 MHz?

Heck yeah, and it supported SMP. I had two of them running on an ABit BP6 motherboard as my Linux workstation. Good times.

The delidding service wouldn't have made sense back then - the whole phenomenon arose only a few years ago when Intel changed the TIM material to something substantially worse than what you could get on the market.

It's still not clear to me why they did that.

But in any case, suddenly the thermal performance of Intel CPUs dropped significantly, which gave rise to the de-lidding phenomenon.

Now that Intel has switched back to a better TIM the era necessarily is over.

10-15 years ago folks did more overclocking but there wasn't really a need to de-lid, it was more about heat dissipation via elaborate cooling setups than messing with the chip package itself.

There is still some performance gains to be had by removing the IHS and placing the cold plate of your cooler straight on the die (and even crazy shit like lapping the die), but yeah, the major reason was intel's bad paste under the ihs.

I'm pretty sure the community has grown, simply by the increase of number of users alone. Extreme overclocking, which this service caters to, seems to have shrunken, though. Probably because of dimishing returns.

Back then, I used to overclock the $hit out of my CPU. Any chance I could get to ramp it up I took.

This one I have now is the first one I haven't overclocked in at least a decade: i9 10900K.

I went from an i7 8700k running all cores at 5GHz to the i9 10900K running stock.

The reason was that I ran HWInfo and saw that it clocked to almost 5GHz on its own with single and dual-threaded workloads anyway. And given the 20 cores, it would hammer through anything that needed multicore.

In short, this is the first time I didn't feel the need to overclock.

It probably mattered a lot more 10-15 years ago. A modern CPUs toward the higher end of consumer grade equipment is so powerful it's ridiculous.

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