Old timers thread. How long have you been in the game?

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JNavy89GT

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Me? I had “computers” dating back to vic20:Commodor64 or if you want to qualify it “pong” gaming system . I had various IBM/intel pc’s but I’d buy them pre-built as it was all black magic voodoo to me lol. But the internet was a wonderful learning tool, so I started “building” and overclocking computers when I bought a decent new computer off eBay with an AMD K6-3 450 that I had to rebuild (due to UPS damage). I learned how to redo that setup and upgrade suspect parts etc. New heatsink, better ram, new graphics and overclocked it to 525mhz lol. it’s been a sickness since.

I was young enough and brave enough to crack open $200-300 slot A AMD Athlon CPU’s(1997) and would resolder resistors to change clock multipliers to overclock 500mhz CPU’s to 850+mhz. Eventually ,Slot moved to socket. Soldering moved to pencils. And eventually everything was in put into bios, which made overclocking accessible to the everyday person. That and windows evolving to allow non MIT grads to install drivers. I exaggerate, but pre windows 95 was a nightmare for me anyway to get networking actually working and just general driver conflicts and memory address issues. Ugh. I get a headache thinking about it!

AMD lost me after athlon x2 and I was with intel until just recently, when I built a Zen4 rig that I’ve enjoyed messing with and cycling several CPU’s and gpus through to gauge performance. Overclocking is a lot more civilized today. I appreciate that in my older age lol.

Looking back. I look fondly on the memories. Along the way, I was able to set a couple records, albeit briefly. I was able to work in review media. I was able to work with a well know memory company in the day and help develop new products and I was a nerd in a candy shop being able to play with unreleased/prototype hardware.

Kids and family happened and it all got put on the back burner. But, I have been having more fun recently tweaking in computers and perusing forums.

Where did your journey begin? Notable things to add?
 
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First computer I personally owned and overclocked was a 386dx40 - to 50mhz. Nearly every computer since has been overclocked or tweaked in some way since (exception being a macbook). No records.. but pencils during the k7 era, fabric clock back in the slot athlon era, watercooling, lots of various bits and pieces.

I don't have a lot to add really, only stuff I've learned along the way:
  • Get good memory from the start, it's not worth your time trying to squeeze more out of it
  • Don't push it to the ragged edge, it's not worth the instability/frustration for a few extra %
  • Always run a UPS
  • Don't cheap out on a case, fans, power supply, thermal compound or graphics card (in order of priority)
  • Buy decent cooling from the start - it doesn't need to be the "best", but get something decent
  • Get a motherboard based on peripherals you need first, everything else is secondary, it's much harder to add ports and things later
 
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Too long. Old enough to remember Tandy's TSR-80.
First time I went homebrew was early 90's though with a nice 386dx 40, four meg of ram, a one meg Trident VLB VGA card, sb sound.
Stylin with win 3.11 Qemm was my friend for gaming in those day.

First OC was on a 300A, then it was on to a BP-6 and twin 333's, then a VP-6 with 1.2Ghz Tullatins. Miss that setup.

Been downhill ever since the last 47 years.
Good thing I learned BASIC in school, it never came in handy.
Never did anything with computers serious tho, went into a civil engineering field and just assemble pc boxes for fun.

Well it used to be until lately. Better things to spend money on these days.
 
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Cutting traces, soldering jumpers on an Amiga 500 in the 80's, adding faster CPUs was my start. Built 100% all of my x86/x64 pcs. OCing today has much less reward than the heyday where you could indeed add 20% plus to your performance easily on both the CPU and graphics card. The glitzy light shows builds today to me is an utter waste of time, might be a few minutes of neat then would be ignored for the rest of the years of service, at least in my case.
 
I was a late bloomer when it comes to really getting into computers. While I had used some like an Apple laptop back when they were the 2 color screens, or my friends computer with 5.25 disks (which we had one eventually) but never really cared..

When I worked at a telecomm company and they had spare parts in a back room, built a 486 system and ended up giving it to my mom, after that I got hooked..

Intel Pentium III 533, intel first 133FSB chips was my fist build, and i overclocked it and the addiction began after that!
 
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My first build was a Pentium 90 overclocked to 100. Blazing speed...... Ran the first ATI graphics card in it to boot!

9600 baud modem for the win. Usurper was a dream on that system
 
Geezer000 said:
My first build was a Pentium 90 overclocked to 100. Blazing speed...... Ran the first ATI graphics card in it to boot!
Click to expand...
where you some of those that ran dos-win3.1 with a Pentium 90 + lot of ram ?

Must have took a lot of time for a computer to ever feel that fast with modern OS...
 
My first "computer" was accessed via teletype 1974. I wanted an Altair but couldn't afford one. My first video game was pong 1973ish. My last video game was Far Cry 6. Still hoping for something new to entice me into spending time on it. EDIT: to follow the overclocking theme...I don't actually overclock to gain performance. I do it mainly as a learning experience. I usually set things back to stock speeds when I'm done.
 
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LukeTbk said:
where you some of those that ran dos-win3.1 with a Pentium 90 + lot of ram ?

Must have took a lot of time for a computer to ever feel that fast with modern OS...
Click to expand...
If by "a lot of RAM" you mean 256mb then sure lol
 
Geezer000 said:
If by "a lot of RAM" you mean 256mb then sure lol
Click to expand...
I had 32 in mind.... (my PC in 1994 had 4)
256 mb would have been quite a lot in 1994, I think I had 128mb on a Pentium 200mmx years later that I upgraded to 256mb at some point, yes 256MB P-90 in 1994 would have been quite the machine that would have costed quite the fortune.
 
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I got into "the game" because of the Celeron 300A (because, well, insanity, right?) and left not much later, why? Higher clocks mean minute (tiny) gains. It was a very different world back in the day. Back then it was spend half as much to get 30-50% gains.

Today, it's like, spend weeks of doing high risk tweaks (sometimes, very high risk) so you can get a few percentage points of uplift (and hope the benchmark runs to completion)? Just doesn't make much sense to me.
 
LukeTbk said:
I had 32 in mind.... (my PC in 1994 had 4)
256 mb would have been quite a lot in 1994, I think I had 128mb on a Pentium 200mmx years later that I upgraded to 256mb at some point, yes 256MB P-90 in 1994 would have been quite the machine that would have costed quite the fortune.
Click to expand...
I think it cost me $3,500 Canadian back then.
 
Around Counter-Strike beta 6 is when I got into tweaking hardware. Before that I was mostly just throwing money at the situation with that video card you plugged your other video card into, for the life of me I can't remember what it was called even though it was a huge deal back in the day.
 
Voodoo or voodoo 2 into 2D graphics. Could SLI 2 of the voodoo 2’s together as well.
 
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The first system I overclocked was my Am 486 DX-40 system where I bumped it up to 50 MHz. Being able to play Doom 2 in full screen mode at high resolution was quite fun.

The only downside was when I tried to run pure 16 bit apps, the system would lock up. Something like Wolfenstein 3D would lock up after about 30 seconds of running.

Anything that had even some 32 bit coding in it, though, ran flawlessly. Doom, Descent, or Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11, along with Lotus Smartsuite all ran flawlessly, and I never had any overheating, while using some cheap, entry level heatsink + cooling fan.
 
PSA, remember this is the Overclocking and Cooling forum. Just trying to keep things on topic rather than a generic trip down memory lane.
 
My first experience with overclocking was with an AMD K6-III+ CPU. Stock speed was 450Mhz and I was able to run it at around 500Mhz, but it was a PoS CPU overall and I did not run it for long.
I ran a Pentium 3 Coppermine CPU, 700Mhz overclocked to 933Mhz simply by adjusting the FSB from 100Mhz to 133Mhz. Simple and easy, and this was a great OC considering that a 1Ghz P3 was basically the fastest CPU available at that time.
I then ran a AMD Thunderbird CPU. 1.4Ghz overclocked to 1.6Ghz, enabled via the "pencil trick".
After that was my first Dual-CPU system, dual Prestonia Xeons (Pentium 4 era), 2.4Ghz overclocked to around 3Ghz, using one of the only dual-Xeon motherboards that had an AGP slot and allowed overclocking. This system was so ahead of it's time, it lasted me a while.
I entered the 64-bit era with a Q6600 (already having a dual-CPU system, I skipped the "dual-core" era). First a Q6600 B3 @ 3.3Ghz, then a Q6600 G0 @ 3.6Ghz, then finally a Q9650 @ 4.4Ghz.
After that I built my Sandy Bridge system, 2500k @ 5Ghz.
Then my first HEDT system, a 5820k @ 4.5Ghz.
That lasted me until I built my first AMD AM4 system, with a 3900X, later upgraded to a 5900X and then a 5800X3D. I only used PBO on these CPUs, so this is basically where my manual overclocking adventure ends, although I continue to OC older systems when it makes sense to do so (like the 8-Core Xeon in my backup computer).
 
Worked on a control system based on Z80 late in 1976.
Lots of S100 based work, CP/M booting off 8" floppy disks. Those drives had AC induction motors in them!
Some of those systems were still in use all the way up to around 1990. We replaced them with Everex i386 clones running PC DOS. They had Seagate MFM drives that sounded like noisy coffee pots when busy. Ridiculous.
 
In 1976/1977, I would go to work with my dad and he taught me to play games on the Wang mini computers. One game turn-based game was so primitive it would only output to the printer.

Later I used early Apply and Pet computers in school and my dad would bring home a Kaypro CP/M computer.

I eventually got a C-64 and a 300bd modem and did the BBS thing which later became an Amiga 500 and a 9600bd modem

then a crappy PC

then a gaming PC - we moved to a specific apartment complex in 1998 because it had a shared T1 line

It's been a continual progression since then from the Voodoo card to the a liquid cooled RTX 3090
 
great thread. my exposure to computers goes WAY back to the IBM 8086 desktop. my dad was a programmer in the early days so i got exposed to computers from a very young age.

he never did overclocking, that was all me. my first one was a voodoo 3 2000. i was poor, needed my video card to last longer. stock was 143 Mhz and i got it to 181 Mhz....then i found some old aluminum 486 heatsinks in the basement and cut them up with a dremel to make ram sinks for the card. got me an extra 2 Mhz up to 183! same speed as the top model 3500, i was so proud of myself. card lasted me to college. the CPU was a celeron 333 which i initially pushed to 450...mianboard limit. board died, got a new one and got somewhere around 480.

and then i graduated college and got a big tax return after my first job....built a sweet opteron 165 system. eventually had two 7900 GTO SLI setup. built myself a custom water setup, ran the CPU and both GPUs. the CPU block i made myself with a drill press. there were problems, but i enjoyed it. i still have many of those parts to this day but i no longer cool the GPU with water as i don't consider it worthwhile anymore.
 
I am in my late 40s, got my first computer in 2002. My buddy was into overclocking, so that meant I was too. Been hurting hardware since 2003. Not so much hurt these days though.. Running these here X3D part is ok for games, but feels like I am running a fancy Dell. IYKYK.

I started with Intel, and went back and forth a few times. I do not play favourites on the system side of things, but I do prefer Nvidia GPUs.
 
Depends on which "game" you mean. Working with computers? discovered computing with the PDP-8 running TSS-8 at CMU in 1974 and never looked back. Comp Center ran a 360 Model 67 with TSS-360 at the time, along with a Univac 1108 (wonderful machine!) running I think Exec II. I got involved with DEC-10's and TOPS-10 for some years writing OS enhancements and fixes. I dealt with a list of Unix-based machines too long to write here in the mid 80's. First home computer I think was a Power Mac 6100; I've had a series of Mac computers at home since then, along with a few different Sun boxes (Sparc 2, Sparc 10, Ultra 60 -- all gone now).

If you mean building computers, first one was in 2018, a Ryzen 2700X-based replacement for a 2009 Mac Pro (the latter mostly running linux instead of Mac OS). I've built several since then; they are all dedicated to work, supporting clustered DBMS development.

and if the "game" is overclocking, I played around with it a bit on a few of my cluster machines and decided it wasn't worth the trouble for what I do.
 
Im not super old yet. Started when my parents bought a 'pc for gaming' and it was a 486-dx2 from some ohio company called midwest micro. First games played was sim city and doom shareware.

My first push into overclocking was an athlonXP system I built. Then it was unlocking its multiplier with a pencil and I had purchased bigger copper heatsink and fan combo. This is also the first time I lapped a heatsink to a mirror finish.

Next big thing i remember doing was a geforce 4 4400ti and changing out its resistor identifiers to make it identify as a quadro to load those drivers to use with 3d studio max. Also used thermal epoxy to put heatsinks on each of the ram modules on it.
 
My first computer was a Tandy TRS-80 with a cassette drive.

First "pc" was a Zenith Microsystems Z-286 with 640kb of ram, 20MB 5.25 hard drive which I upgraded to 1.2mb RAM (ISA card), VGA and a Adlib soundcard.

Given this is the Overclocking and cooling section, my first WC system was around 2003 and was a Danger Den TDX cooling an AMD Athlon 64 with some jank external fishtank pump. Shortly after upgraded to a Athlon x2 +4200 with gtx6800s in SLI cooled by two DD Maze 5s and the OG Danger Den D5 pump (which still works).
 
THRESHIN said:
great thread. my exposure to computers goes WAY back to the IBM 8086 desktop. my dad was a programmer in the early days so i got exposed to computers from a very young age.

he never did overclocking, that was all me. my first one was a voodoo 3 2000. i was poor, needed my video card to last longer. stock was 143 Mhz and i got it to 181 Mhz....then i found some old aluminum 486 heatsinks in the basement and cut them up with a dremel to make ram sinks for the card. got me an extra 2 Mhz up to 183! same speed as the top model 3500, i was so proud of myself. card lasted me to college. the CPU was a celeron 333 which i initially pushed to 450...mianboard limit. board died, got a new one and got somewhere around 480.

and then i graduated college and got a big tax return after my first job....built a sweet opteron 165 system. eventually had two 7900 GTO SLI setup. built myself a custom water setup, ran the CPU and both GPUs. the CPU block i made myself with a drill press. there were problems, but i enjoyed it. i still have many of those parts to this day but i no longer cool the GPU with water as i don't consider it worthwhile anymore.
Click to expand...
Man, I remember cutting up old heatsinks to mount onto older gpus. And also, cutting up heatsinks to mount on the ram chips which were never cooled(GeForce 2). Getting another 10-20mhz on the ram could net a record. Even if it was only for hours, until someone else beat you/. The gpu coolers were garbage back in the day, but I guess did the job. Good times though to hear your thread and think back!!!

I gotta dig out my old phase change cooler to let people see the struggles we had to set records lol

New computers are AWESOME!!!! No pci conflicts. Installing network drivers was an exercise in frustration! Overclocking now is simple but irrelevant!

Back in the day. That $150. 333mhz celeron, or 650mhz duron, or base cpu could be made to compete with $1k plus CPU’s. Not 1k today $. 1k$ back in 1996 etc….

Today, If you could overclock an Nvidia 4060 to 4090 performance, you’d be like WTF!!! Hell yeah!!!. That’s kinda like what we were dealing with. Relatively anyway lol. Fun Wild West times. Nice trip down memory lane!
 
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First system I had with an OC board was a used q9300 I picked up from work lol, got a p5q pro turbo board for it since it was well after core2's time. A little after that I built an SR-2 rig lol. I guess technically I could have overclocked my athlon xp but the heatsink I had wasn't the best.
 
I'm not an "old-timer".... I refuse to accept that label :LOL:

But.. in regards to overclocking.. i dabbled a tiny bit.. just typical "what was popular in the mainstream tech world"..
My first encounter with overclocking I believe was the Pentium MMX 133... I believe that involved changing the bus multiplier from x2 to x2.5, on the 66 Mhz FSB, effectively running it at 166 Mhz...
Then the famous Celeron 300 @ 450 era... That chip was a given ...
Then I believe some sort of PIII Slot 1 CPU I had some success with... I can't remember which one it was... may have been the Coppermine 600.. run the FSB from 100 to 133 , to have it running at 800 Mhz
And then... I had some AMD chip.. that you could use a #2 lead pencil.. and make a "connection" and boom...
And after that... I don't recall too much regarding CPU's..
I don't consider Ryzen PBO +200mhz overclocking.. so I'll refrain from using a 5000 Series Ryzen as a contributor to overclocking
 
JNavy89GT said:
Man, I remember cutting up old heatsinks to mount onto older gpus. And also, cutting up heatsinks to mount on the ram chips which were never cooled(GeForce 2). Getting another 10-20mhz on the ram could net a record. Even if it was only for hours, until someone else beat you/. The gpu coolers were garbage back in the day, but I guess did the job. Good times though to hear your thread and think back!!!

I gotta dig out my old phase change cooler to let people see the struggles we had to set records lol

New computers are AWESOME!!!! No pci conflicts. Installing network drivers was an exercise in frustration! Overclocking now is simple but irrelevant!

Back in the day. That $150. 333mhz celeron, or 650mhz duron, or base cpu could be made to compete with $1k plus CPU’s. Not 1k today $. 1k$ back in 1996 etc….

Today, If you could overclock an Nvidia 4060 to 4090 performance, you’d be like WTF!!! Hell yeah!!!. That’s kinda like what we were dealing with. Relatively anyway lol. Fun Wild West times. Nice trip down memory lane!
Click to expand...
I'm the kind of person that likes to tinker with things. I maintain my cars myself simply because I like it. I work at a nuclear power plant. So new computers.....I miss the tinkering!!

Like you I came to the conclusion that overclocking and even water cooling (for the most part) is irrelevant now. Intel you can squeak a bit out, but AMD not much. Forget overclocking GPUs, I'm quite convinced that's a waste of time now.

I suppose I have more time for my kids this way, but I still do miss it sometimes. All but useless skills these days. Funny, I have plenty of those.
 
I had a "Leading Edge" 8088 with the hercules monochrome graphics card. I think the only game I could get running before I upgraded to a 386 was Space Quest 3 because it let you play in Monochrome instead of CGA as a minimum.
 
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