This is a brief story of my computing history and all the crazy stuff I got up to.
The 1990s – Slow Beginnings
My first personal computer (PC) was an Intel Pentium II running some version of Windows 3.1x. At that time I was a kid and all I that I was interested in were the games I could play on the PC, ooo the good old days of Solitare and Minesweeper. I remember my father had purchased a CD-Drive which was a big thing back then but nobody knew how to install it safely while I was in Bulgaria and I didn’t have the technical knowledge how to do so, looking back it was a simple task of plugging in some cables and installing the drivers via floppy disk.
My family, decided to return back to SA in the late 1990s they then purchased me a Packard Bell Intel Celeron desktop PC, at the time these machines were quite pricey and my parents and I knew nothing much about computer specs, essentially the salesperson had sold us some a slow PC at the time which I would find out about later.
As games evolved from simple Solitare and Minesweeper to Age of Empires, Doom and Sim City, I quickly realized that in order to play the games smoothly I required a faster PC. My parents didn’t want to buy me a new PC as it was a costly exercise, so I found the concept of PC Overclocking in order to get more performance out of my PC at the time.
‘Overclocking in the context of computing devices refers to making them ‘run faster’ than originally intended. More specifically it is the configuration of computer hardware components to operate faster than certified by the original manufacturer, with ‘faster’ specified as clock frequency in megahertz (MHz) or gigahertz (GHz). Commonly operating voltage is also increased to maintain a component’s operational stability at accelerated speeds. Semiconductor devices operated at higher frequencies and voltages increase power consumption and heat.1 An overclocked device may be unreliable or fail completely if the additional heat load is not removed or power delivery components cannot meet increased power demands.’
The 2000s – Overclocking Days
In the pursuit of more computing performance to play the latest games, myself and my cousin had stumbled upon the concept of PC overlocking on the Internet on some of the early PC forums both international and local such as the South African forums as SystemShock and Prophecy both of which no longer exist. We spent days reading on how we could improve the performance of our current PC’s, learning about all the different computer components and how we could build our own custom desktop PC’s. At the time we had never done such a thing and we were scared at the prospects of killing expensive hardware, which did happen. RIP AMD Athlon 64.
Things escalated quickly as can be seen below at one of the first public exhibitions of PC overclocking myself and Jay conducted at Rage Expo 2005. We managed to break some local SuperPI calculation records that day.
Prior to that day there was a lot of experimentation with PC hardware, we changed configurations so many times in the persuit of performance and then conducted tests to see how fast we could push the hardware at the time by running computer benchmark programs like the 3D Mark programs and those Super PI calculations and even Memory Frequency Speed Tests.
Here are some pictures of our overclocking adventures, with liquid cooling, dry ice and liquid nitrogen (LN2). All in the pursuit of more computing speed. Testing the limits of hardware in the early days, pioneering live 1 picture every second live streaming 10 years before it became common around the world.
Playing with AMD and Intel CPU based systems with single and dual nVidia GPU setups.
Cooling it from simple heat sinks + fans to custom water cooled loops and copper CPU pots.
We did most of it, but the fun had to come to an end as it was a very expensive hobby with no real recognition or support of the work we were doing back them. Funny how things have changed over the last decade or so.