Maximum PC

What was the first tweak hardware wise that you've done? When was the first time you actually encountered the topic of hardware tweaks. (not just overclocking)

My first encounter was with a tape drive for the very old VIC-20! There was a screw that you could turn to increase the speed of the tape drive to make the programs load faster.

My earliest hardware tweak that I can recall ATM:

I never tweaked in my commodore and 386 days. Actually the first physical twaek I did, was to add a stock AMD T-Bird heatsink/fan and Ramsinks to my Radeon AIW 32MB. Then did a volt mod to it. Before the mod I got my OC to 202/202 on that card. Afterwards it did 210/210 watch out! lol. It was an ugly looking monstrosity too.

Next I remember tweaking the autoexec.bat and config.sys files in DOS 5 to get 'Big' games to play.

Good to see the old C64 mentioned!

AMD K6-2. i upped the FSB to like 110mhz.

It's what basically got me into computers. Never looked back since.

my first hardware tweeks were a lesson never to be forgotten..never do them all at the same time

this lesson was quickly followed by another lesson...how to reinstall an os

I remember using one in 1982 and I had no tape drive to start with...typing in all that schitz only to have it disappear once you turned it off...but I quickly learned BASIC that way...

trash 80 doubled mem to 32k, added hardware reset switch.

my dad tweaked his Atari's out doubling things, adding things and other various things

using a homemade thermal paste to add a killer looking 3 pronged heatsink on to the little 2 inch stick of 32MB ram in my first system.

The first video card that I oc'd was a Creative Labs Banshee (Voodoo 2 based) card. Got about 5% increase out of it.

My first tweak was the "Turbo" button. It took me quite a while to realize what it did, but then again I was only 7 years old!

If you can't count the turbo button as a tweak, then my first tweak was oc'ing my AMD Athlon 700mhz chip to 800mhz. I was quite pleased with it.

My most recent tweak is of course running an AMD Barton 2500+ at 3200+. As soon as I get more fans and fan connecters in the mail I may try to take it higher. Last I checked the CPU temp it was at 49C. But current fans are 2x 80mm. Soon it will be 1x 120mm, 2x 80mm, and 1x 60mm! Thing is going to be so much cooler!

Dan O.

I think it was overclocking a 233MHz Pentium MMX to 266Mhz.

The first time I oc'd a cpu and vid card together was my Duron 400MHz @ 450 MHz and my Radeon 64DDR running 10% quicker (I don't remember the actual clock speeds of that Radeon)

I overclocked my 486-DX2. Don't remember the speeds or anything (God, its been over a decade already?!?)

The lowest speed Duron sold was a 600Mhz unit.

Punching tape to make my ship's turbines run at higher TIT with the waterwash system on. Without new tape, you could overtemp due to the leaning of the fuel mixture. But, once the ship was a couple months old...

Reading through Navy Tech Manuals and Litton Engineering diagrams trying to figure out how Windows CE (yup) was intigrated in to replace the tape looms on a BSD control system (later ditched for the parts availability of the old discrete ckts). Again, my first tweak was to get the turbines to run with the water on. I was comfortable with the parameters.

Very funky setup it was indeed. It was interesting being on that ship because you always had techreps trying something new out. When the old salts and new "schoolers" came on and opened up the panels to find empty looms was a hoot. As soon as I nudged them to the touchscreen panel displaying "windows CE" on it, they usually grumbled and gave up without a fight:D