v-raze

that one AuDHD coyote friend

  • he/him/his

I love you all.

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avatar art by @Coyotlito


plumpan
@plumpan

Since I'm absolutely not going to bother reviving this elsewhere, I can talk a bit about my ideas.

So, the overall idea was, "wow overclocking sure was fun back in the day, why not put something together to give people a reason to drag stuff out of the closet, mess with it, and post about it?" I was kinda debating calling it a competition at all, even tho COCC is an ideal acronym. The rules were going to be, basically

Hardware

Nothing that uses DDR3 or newer ram

Anything older than a Celeron 300A is discouraged for software reasons, but if you must

Please do not use anything you don't mind breaking, that's how this works

No sub ambient cooling allowed, with the exception of ice bucket assisted water cooling

(This is also discouraged for condensation reasons, be careful)

Software

You must boot from this linux live image (i386 and x86_64 versions)

You may pick X number of benchmarks out of Y total. You should pick ones that complete in a reasonable time, but you can always run something for an hour straight if you wish


And so basically I was going to sit down and pick a distro that livebooted easily even on older systems, possibly an older image, and make a little python script to run a benchmark menu with some basic, ideally real world benchmarks. Video and audio encodes, maybe a test compile, etc. All CPU benchmarks, nothing GPU. This would have been the "fun" part for me, I like ffmpeg and coming up with silly, not very useful, little performance tests.

The idea was to compare performance at stock speeds vs overclocked, basically going for the largest performance delta possible. The goal again being to show just how much you could get out of old computers from overclocking vs what you do today. I'd expect a lot of 50 to damn near 100% improvements on the right chips, most older stuff would probably do close to 50% if pushed well.

The other goal was to hopefully get people to use stuff they already had sitting around and not go buy things just for it. "Competitive" overclocking is such a huge money sink, it sucks lol.

I really wanted to have it in the dead of winter, so there's always the chance to just put the computer outside at 2am when it's cold as hell out, and blast the fans. Great way to keep temps down for cheap.

It would have been nice to have people all messing around with different eras of hardware, and chatting about all the silly little nuances we learned back when on how to make them go fast.


lapisnev
@lapisnev

this would have been a really badass idea and it's a shame that both of us and half of the people that would have been participating are just not going to go to any other social media website after this and that's the end of it


v-raze
@v-raze

I agree, I think it would have been a blast. In lieu of actually being able to do it, here's some related nostalgia on my part:

My first pc build was on LGA 775, overclocking the crap out of an E7300 with a budget board (GA-P31-ES3G) and a 4GB kit of DDR2. If my notes from back then are to believed I had it rock-solid stable at 3.51 GHz on air. I found the case, power supply, and processor in a pile of abandoned parts on the curb at trash day that looked to have come from a defunct system builder (and included a couple intel engineering sample CPUs, which I think I still have somewhere). I built it in high school to sell to a friend and classmate, but he didn't end up having the money for it after all, so I gave it to him as a graduation gift. I have no idea how long he kept it since we mostly fell out of touch after graduating. I hope it did well for him.

So yes I am a wee bab, but I did start early enough to still have parts that would work for this sitting in a box downstairs: an Asus P5QL Pro and a pad-modded Xeon X5450 that I did all the work of getting running back in the day, but never got around to completing a system with. Maybe if I have some time this month I'll fire that thing up anyways just to see what it can do.


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in reply to @v-raze's post:

Ah the pad mod xeon days

I've got some 775 kit laying around and I think I may have looked for a e4300 to pick up if anything. 1.8ghz chip that would do twice that if the ram could keep up.

The power use jump wasn't to be ignored but you could save a lot of money on a good CPU back then. Just straight up buying something cheaper and running it fast and hot.

Or just cheap CPUs. The 3000G never really came back.