Saw a video by Gamer's Nexus that featured our very own k|ngp|n. Made me think back of the waaaaayyyy back when. When I was just a fresh faced kid who got his first overclockable hardware. Well, by means of BIOS anyway. Good on you, man. Who knew fifteen years ago that someone could make a living off of nerding out on pushing their hardware with liquid nitrogen.

I gotta say, this place was nice back between 02 to 10. I was a lurker for a while before I joined, but I'm glad I did. I learned a lot, and much of that carried over to this old FX 8350 (Previously 8320; VRM failure killed it,) I've been running for the last five or so years which does what I need. And it still continues to do so because of what I originally learned here. IMC is weak and I can't get 2400 out of the ram like I could on my 8320 no matter what I try, but that's fine. I can get the timings real tight so it's no big loss one way or the other. It's also quite finicky and has an impenetrable wall at 4940 on the cpu clock, but that too is fine.

What i mean to say is that were it not for these forums, I wouldn't have been able to min-max this CPU like I have. CPU, CPU/NB, RAM and it's timings, and even the BCLK, all of it plays a difference and adds up. Hell, even the divider ratios on clocks can play a slight difference. Minor, yes. But it all adds up.

There were also a lot of crazy concepts back then. Cooling with liquid nitrogen.. Slapping a damned window unit compressor onto the CPU to get it Sub Zero; just wild stuff to me back then that I never would have thought of otherwise. Granted I've still yet to do LN2 or anything crazy like phase exchange (Shout out to Chilly 1 and... That.. Ordeal) but I'd like to one day. Especially phase. It just seems so egregious and absurd that it insists upon itself to be done at one point if you're into this nonsense. Ln2 is pretty much standard these days in terms of seeing just how far a CPU can go, but back in 03, it blew my mind to use something so "scientific" on a CPU to freeze it. Man, that broke a T-1000! Why would you put it on a CPU?!

So here's to XS and what it was back then. What it was for a lot of us. A place to gather and share knowledge to get the most out of our systems. We even were at the top of Folding@Home for a while! We even had a DFI engineer (!) regularly post here! If I'm not mistaken, he's with Asus now. Or was for a bit once DFI dissolved. Andre Yang, I believe. Might be wrong on that as that's when I stopped checking in regularly. Either way, it's just kinda neat to reflect upon.

So for the Old Guard who still hang out around here and remember to check every so often, hope you reflect back on the old days. For those new who happen to find this place on Google for old hardware and look into what it was, know it was pretty ing legit back then. Xtreme Systems was a pretty cool place to hang out.

Anyway, hope all who was around back then is doing well 15 years later. Or something. Yeah.