Awesome video, that was my budget CPU of choice since it appeared and the fact you could pencil unlock them and increase the multiplier a bit was the icing on the cake!
Awesome video, I really enjoyed it! I never owned a Duron back in the day but they were very popular and rightly so! The L2 cache reduction really doesn't hold it back all that much. I'd be very curious to see if recapping the board improved stability at higher multipliers. It could also be that that specific chip just really needs the extra vcore to get up there though. I really like the way you did the testing with everything 'as is' and used very common budget parts as well. This was really more representative of the way the vast majority of us had our systems back then. PC parts were really expensive - you had to work with what you had. Great job! 👍
Thank you very much. Yeah I wanted to go with more of a what I had vibe rather than the bleeding edge hardware that I could only dream of affording. At least until I got my first real job, after that a lot of socket A Athlons were sacrificed going for ever higher overclocks :) A bag of capacitors has arrived in the post today.....I have to admit that the dying caps on that board has had me wondering too. Definitely going to follow this up.
23:34 Agreed, I feel you should have been able to get more out of that CPU. I overclocked my friends Duron 750 back in the day to over 1GHz with the pencil trick 🤷🏻♂️
1GHz was the magic number I remember a lot of Durons hitting, but maybe I'm only remembering the good ones. I'm going to follow this up in the future to see if I can find what was holding this one back.
You nailed it! You brought a pencil to a gunfight and won the day! Kudos to you for trying everything under the sun for all the overclocking you could do. Does that Chaintech mobo allow over/under volting?
Thanks! Sadly no voltage options on this board. The pads are there but no dip switches are installed. All this time later it still makes me smile that we could unlock these CPUs with something as simple as a pencil. It sure beat messing about with the goldfinger type devices on the slot 1 / slot A CPUs. (Also I couldn't find my conductive pen!)
Nice! The Duron 750 was a beloved overclocker. I feel like maybe the VIA chipset might've been holding you back with this one; a later-rev board might have worked better? No matter what, it was a great look at a classic old overclocker! Thanks for the video!
Thank you! Good suggestion on the chipset possibly holding things back. I do have some other Socket A boards with different chipsets, so I'm going to add that to the list of things to try when I re-visit this.
The Duron 700 was my second CPU I specifically bought because of its overclocking capabilities in 2001 (the first one was the unbeatable Celeron300A at 450MHz). It ran fine at 900 MHz with a little increase in voltage, albeit at around 75 degrees C as far as I remember. Paired with a GeForce 256 DDR, it was a killer gaming machine for a fair price.
Yeah, those Celeron 300A's were fantastic overclockers, especially for their time compared to the full Pentiums. The Durons were good too, I really ought to dig out an Athlon of the same speed and compate them clock for clock.
I have a Duron 1000 MHz which I've managed to overclock 6 x 200 on an nforce2 board. It was rock stable, it did not overheat and it even didn't need raising the voltage as far as I remember.
Back in mid-2001 i purchased a Duron 750 mhz, 128 mb and TNT2 M64. Back then I was afraid to overclock the system but I always wondered what frequency my Duron could have reached.
Loved this era of overclocking, had a Slot A Athlon first with the gold finger device and unlocked multiplier then Duron and Athlon Socket A systems. Duron pencil trick made these chips a no brainer, imagine AMD or Intel releasing something like this these days? a budget chip that could be quickly modified to compete with just about anything "high end"
Yeah I remember the little gold finger devices you could buy, I think they were just a bunch of DIP switches to connect on to the contacts on the CPU. I do kinda miss overclocking these days. I know you can still do it to an extent in the BIOS/UEFI, but most of it happens automatically now with boost clocks and what not, which kinda takes some of the fun out of it. Gimme a Duron and a pencil everytime!
I used a duron 700 mhz on socket A underclocked to the base minimum and disabled cache and system memory to play the old dos games. As a dos pc slower is better😂
Awesome video, that was my budget CPU of choice since it appeared and the fact you could pencil unlock them and increase the multiplier a bit was the icing on the cake!
Thanks! I agree, nothing more than a pencil and a steady hand to unlock them felt like you were cheating the system to get a nice overclock :)
Awesome video, I really enjoyed it! I never owned a Duron back in the day but they were very popular and rightly so! The L2 cache reduction really doesn't hold it back all that much. I'd be very curious to see if recapping the board improved stability at higher multipliers. It could also be that that specific chip just really needs the extra vcore to get up there though. I really like the way you did the testing with everything 'as is' and used very common budget parts as well. This was really more representative of the way the vast majority of us had our systems back then. PC parts were really expensive - you had to work with what you had. Great job! 👍
Thank you very much. Yeah I wanted to go with more of a what I had vibe rather than the bleeding edge hardware that I could only dream of affording. At least until I got my first real job, after that a lot of socket A Athlons were sacrificed going for ever higher overclocks :)
A bag of capacitors has arrived in the post today.....I have to admit that the dying caps on that board has had me wondering too. Definitely going to follow this up.
Vary nice to see an AMD in the mix. You did a great job.
Thank you! I burned quite a lot of these Durons and Athlons out back in the day in search of every higher overclocks.
23:34 Agreed, I feel you should have been able to get more out of that CPU. I overclocked my friends Duron 750 back in the day to over 1GHz with the pencil trick 🤷🏻♂️
1GHz was the magic number I remember a lot of Durons hitting, but maybe I'm only remembering the good ones. I'm going to follow this up in the future to see if I can find what was holding this one back.
You nailed it!
You brought a pencil to a gunfight and won the day!
Kudos to you for trying everything under the sun for all the overclocking you could do.
Does that Chaintech mobo allow over/under volting?
Thanks! Sadly no voltage options on this board. The pads are there but no dip switches are installed.
All this time later it still makes me smile that we could unlock these CPUs with something as simple as a pencil. It sure beat messing about with the goldfinger type devices on the slot 1 / slot A CPUs. (Also I couldn't find my conductive pen!)
Nice! The Duron 750 was a beloved overclocker. I feel like maybe the VIA chipset might've been holding you back with this one; a later-rev board might have worked better?
No matter what, it was a great look at a classic old overclocker! Thanks for the video!
Thank you! Good suggestion on the chipset possibly holding things back. I do have some other Socket A boards with different chipsets, so I'm going to add that to the list of things to try when I re-visit this.
@@RetroSuperhighway Good luck!
The Duron 700 was my second CPU I specifically bought because of its overclocking capabilities in 2001 (the first one was the unbeatable Celeron300A at 450MHz). It ran fine at 900 MHz with a little increase in voltage, albeit at around 75 degrees C as far as I remember. Paired with a GeForce 256 DDR, it was a killer gaming machine for a fair price.
Yeah, those Celeron 300A's were fantastic overclockers, especially for their time compared to the full Pentiums. The Durons were good too, I really ought to dig out an Athlon of the same speed and compate them clock for clock.
I have a Duron 1000 MHz which I've managed to overclock 6 x 200 on an nforce2 board. It was rock stable, it did not overheat and it even didn't need raising the voltage as far as I remember.
Nice! Thats a decent overclock out of that chip. The nforce was a decent M/B chipset for overclocking form what I remember.
That was an enjoyable presentation.
A 10% gain is a good one
Glad you enjoyed it! 10% is not bad, but as with all overclocks, I always feel like I want more speed :)
Back in mid-2001 i purchased a Duron 750 mhz, 128 mb and TNT2 M64. Back then I was afraid to overclock the system but I always wondered what frequency my Duron could have reached.
Hopefully it would have gone a little higher than this one managed!
@@RetroSuperhighway i'm sure that with a better motherboard it would have been able to OC to 900-1000 mhz
Nice video!
Thanks!
Loved this era of overclocking, had a Slot A Athlon first with the gold finger device and unlocked multiplier then Duron and Athlon Socket A systems. Duron pencil trick made these chips a no brainer, imagine AMD or Intel releasing something like this these days? a budget chip that could be quickly modified to compete with just about anything "high end"
Yeah I remember the little gold finger devices you could buy, I think they were just a bunch of DIP switches to connect on to the contacts on the CPU. I do kinda miss overclocking these days. I know you can still do it to an extent in the BIOS/UEFI, but most of it happens automatically now with boost clocks and what not, which kinda takes some of the fun out of it. Gimme a Duron and a pencil everytime!
@@RetroSuperhighway Right on! this was the best era for overclocking I think
I used a duron 700 mhz on socket A underclocked to the base minimum and disabled cache and system memory to play the old dos games. As a dos pc slower is better😂
Thats a nice use for a Duron with the slow clockspeed and cache disabled. What kind of CPU/speed was it closest to like that?
@@RetroSuperhighway Fully crippled its more like a 386 equivalent. But with semi modern i/o.
Waw, potato OC with stock cooler.