What exactly would be the point to overclocking, say, a 386 DX/40 to ridiculous levels when you could just get a Pentium and achieve the same thing with considerably more stability?

But maybe that's a stupid question.

Uhh... because it's neat?

Would be awesome to see a PentiumMMX being pushed beyond 300 MHz. Also cool chips like AMD's x5 come to mind.
An original Pentium clocked beyond 66 MHz would be my arch setup though I doubt there's a Socket 4 board with bus frequencies beyond the usual 66.

I don't see the point of this project. This stuff will be unstable way before it reaches a critical temperature, mostly due to slow peripherals and bit-skewing.

Didn't need exotic cooling for overclocking until Athlon and P4. But I've never bothered with more than air cooling.

I considered old water cooling gear, not for any overclocking intent but because I like playing with water - aquariums, plumbing, dishwashers etc. 😎

That full-immersion mineral oil affair looks a bit over the top to me. Risks being very messy when you start swapping cards.

Overclocking retro rigs would only be useful if there was something only a retro rig could do, but couldn't do fast enough. Were any retro-gear-dependent games or other applications sufficiently bottlenecked to be worth it? Some glide flight sim maybe [I know zilch about flight sims...]?

Its been tried before 😀

http://totl.net/Eunuch/Eunuch2.html

DonutKing wrote:

Its been tried before 😀

http://totl.net/Eunuch/Eunuch2.html

I call BS. A 486SX doesn't even have a FPU, yet they claim to play Quake and HL on that thing?

DonutKing wrote:

Its been tried before 😀

http://totl.net/Eunuch/Eunuch2.html

🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣

Oil cooling works very good, but is extremely messy.

Also for some reason almost everybody uses transparent plastic fish tanks for the container, which is an epic fail as plastic is a heat insulator and defeats the purpose. Something copper would work wonderfully in radiating oil heat, like a vintage copper laundry boiler:

Some cosmetic modding to give it a Steampunk look and you'd be extremely well served 😀 .

Water cooling only makes sense for systems where air cooling will not fit/work or you just don't like fan noise.

I can't think of anything that retro where you would need it. Lets say you can cool a 286 to run stable at 40mhz, the support chips won't work reliably so no dice. You have the same issues with 386/486 plus peripherals would crap out. Once you get into PCI era machines you are probably just better off using a large copper based heatsink with a large but lower RPM fan then getting into water cooling.

Water cooling only made sense when the faster P4's came out.

d1stortion wrote:

DonutKing wrote:

Its been tried before 😀

http://totl.net/Eunuch/Eunuch2.html

I call BS. A 486SX doesn't even have a FPU, yet they claim to play Quake and HL on that thing?

Yeah thats obviously a humour article, I mean a Vooodoo in an EISA slot & a freezer that does -53C!? Stills its good read 😀

A liquid cooled retro? The P4 Prescott - it's almost obligatory 😀
Then again the oil might start to boil. But if you used lard instead of mineral oil you'd have a decent fat fryer...

Mmmh, Prescott fried french fries. The ultimate gamer meal 😀 .

A Tejas prototype would be better through. Might be more usable for melting steel however 😉 .

Nah, Preshott's fieriness is overrated, just a bit of decent air cooling suffices to tame the beast.

Nice! duct the exhaust for use as a hair dryer or room heater;)

I actually used to have this spare house on a property I lived on a few years back where I would keep my computer junk, hang out with my friends, watch movies, and play lan games on a bunch of (mostly) Pentium 4 boxes. With all those things running along with the CRT monitors I had hooked to them, the room they were in would just heat up like CRAZY. 🤣

I think most of them were Northwoods, but there were definitely also a few Preshotts as well.

Air cooling has got to very good efficiency nowadays.

This is a snapshot of my temp using Hardware Monitor :

This is my main desktop, after a few hours of running.

I'm using this Cooler Master V6GT air cooler for the i5 2500K cpu:

Water/Liquid cooling is more expensive to setup, can be messy and is more difficult to manage/maintain.

Of course, I'm not overclocking, and I don't like overclocking either.

As Jorpho said, the practicality of overclocking a lesser system, when better alternatives exist (for eg. Pentium 200MMX over an overclocked 486) is non-existent.

If it's only for just an alternative cpu cooling (without overclocking of any sort), for a classic system, if one wants a liquid cooling solution, and has money and time to do it, why not, especially if one wants to keep up with the maintenance as well.

My father actually made a watercooled computer in the late 90s and early 2000. He used both conventional water cooling and peltier elements. The latter one actually produced snow inside the computer case. Of course it didn't exist any kits as it do now, so he made everything him self. I still remember the water hoses in the roof going from the cold water intake of the boiler to the computer for a constant cool water supply. He used this when he overclocked the Celeron 300A to about 600 or 650MHz. Over a 100% increase in speed. Sometimes I wish the equipment wasn't thrown away in the bin. Would be cool to rig it up again.

Malik wrote:

... Water/Liquid cooling is more expensive to setup, can be messy and is more difficult to manage/maintain ...

Agreed. If you know how to set up a powerful case ventilation you don't need any liquid at all (except beer perhaps 😁 ), even if you overclock to death.
Six-core Phenom II Zosma/Thuban @ 4.1GHz (~161W TDP at full burner), air-cooled:

Ambient temp 29C. Left idling with fans @ 40%, right burning with fans @ just 80% RPM.

Venerable ancient CPUs with much lower TDPs are piece of cake for easy air cooling, the only problem being the atrocious standard ventilation in many of the old cases 😵 .