<story><title>The Odd Story of Factory-Downgraded 486s (2020)</title><url>https://x86.fr/the-odd-story-of-factory-downgraded-486s/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krylon</author><text>Something similar might have happened with Celeron 300 CPUs, I recall they could be overclocked to 450MHz as well without trouble. I think they didn&amp;#x27;t have as much cache as the Pentium II, but the increased clock rate meant you could get a pretty fast CPU for cheap.</text></item><item><author>perbu</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve got a similar story.&lt;p&gt;In 1998 a had a summer job, as a programmer, in a little shop that built computers. At the time there was a short of Pentium II 300Mhz chips. One day the logistics guy mentioned they had gotten a batch of Pentium II 300Mhz marked with an operating voltage of 2.0V, instead of the usual 2.8V. Hmm.&lt;p&gt;Intel had taken a bunch of their most expensive CPUs, PII-450Mhz, using the brand new 250nm process and rebranded them as the cheapest CPUs which were at the time built with a 350nm process. You could just take this, stick in a motherboard an change the base frequency and you&amp;#x27;d have the best CPU Intel could make.&lt;p&gt;We never sold any of those CPU to customers. We all bought ourselves new CPUs that day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simondotau</author><text>Not only could you overclock the Celeron 300A, with the right motherboard you could run two of them in a dual CPU configuration.[0] This was my first high performance computer! Initially I dual booted Windows NT 4 and Windows 98, but soon enough Windows 2000 was released and allowed me to make practical everyday use of the two cores. It was an extremely satisfying computer to own.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;ABIT_BP6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;ABIT_BP6&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The Odd Story of Factory-Downgraded 486s (2020)</title><url>https://x86.fr/the-odd-story-of-factory-downgraded-486s/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krylon</author><text>Something similar might have happened with Celeron 300 CPUs, I recall they could be overclocked to 450MHz as well without trouble. I think they didn&amp;#x27;t have as much cache as the Pentium II, but the increased clock rate meant you could get a pretty fast CPU for cheap.</text></item><item><author>perbu</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve got a similar story.&lt;p&gt;In 1998 a had a summer job, as a programmer, in a little shop that built computers. At the time there was a short of Pentium II 300Mhz chips. One day the logistics guy mentioned they had gotten a batch of Pentium II 300Mhz marked with an operating voltage of 2.0V, instead of the usual 2.8V. Hmm.&lt;p&gt;Intel had taken a bunch of their most expensive CPUs, PII-450Mhz, using the brand new 250nm process and rebranded them as the cheapest CPUs which were at the time built with a 350nm process. You could just take this, stick in a motherboard an change the base frequency and you&amp;#x27;d have the best CPU Intel could make.&lt;p&gt;We never sold any of those CPU to customers. We all bought ourselves new CPUs that day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dspillett</author><text>IIRC the Celeron chips coming out of the fabs tested better than Intel expected with far more of the batches being rated as stable as higher-spec units. This lead to a shortage of cheaper units that people were trying to buy and an excess of faster units that people didn&amp;#x27;t want to pay for. To avoid both missing sales &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; having a lot of stock sat in warehouses, many batches of Celeron chips that had tested fine to be sold as the faster models were binned with those that were only rated for the slower speeds. This meant that if you were lucky you could safely overclock the cheaper units by officially extravagant amounts, without extra special cooling arrangements or other hacks, and many did.&lt;p&gt;You could tell (at least initially, I&amp;#x27;m not sure if Intel changed this later) from part of the product code that you definitely had one of the units from a batch that tested fine at the higher speeds, so it wasn&amp;#x27;t that much of a gamble either.&lt;p&gt;We referred to them as Silly-ron CPUs.</text></comment>