Overclocker pushes a 14-year-old Celeron to 8.36GHz
It's a little off the world record, but it shows no CPU is ever too old to OC.
![Intel Celeron D 347](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/GHiemH6h9rV3484wtiCuRe-320-80.jpg)
A Chinese overclock, ivanqu0208 (via El Chapuzas Informatico) has recently managed to push a venerable Celeron D 347 to 8.36GHz. In case Intel's ever-changing naming conventions don't give the game away, that's a CPU from 2006. Yup, just because a chip isn't cutting edge, doesn't mean that it can rest on its stock frequency laurels and enjoy some simple web browsing in its twilight years.
For those that don't remember, the Intel Celeron D 347 is a single-core, single-thread Cedar Mill CPU with a stock frequency of 3.06GHz, a 533MHz frontside bus, 85W TDP, and plugged into the LGA775 socket—gamers of a certain age may get a bit misty-eyed about that socket, it was home to the likes of the Core 2 Duo E8600 and the numerous Pentium 4s.
The overclock of 8,362.21MHz on liquid nitrogen (LN2) equates to a 173 percent improvement from the stock clock.
Not a bad bit of overclocking, but with the world record sitting at 8,516.17Mhz, there's still some way to go. It's worth pointing out that the world record was hit over seven years ago by fellow TeamChina member wytiwx, which has us wondering why ivanqu0208 is breaking out the old chips for a bit more loving? Possibly simply to score a few more points on the world overclocking stage for managing the second-highest overclock of the chip.
Best CPU for gaming: the top chips from Intel and AMD
Best graphics card: your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: get into the game ahead of the rest
In case you're wondering, Ivanqu0208 doesn't just overclock older chips and has plenty of more modern overclocks under their belt, including taking a Core i9 10900K up to 7,298MHz and a Ryzen 9 5950X to 6,049MHz.
If you want to see just how far you can push the latest chips, then HWBOT is worth a visit. Either way, it's good to see some classic chips getting some LN2 love.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Alan has been writing about PC tech since before 3D graphics cards existed, and still vividly recalls having to fight with MS-DOS just to get games to load. He fondly remembers the killer combo of a Matrox Millenium and 3dfx Voodoo, and seeing Lara Croft in 3D for the first time. He's very glad hardware has advanced as much as it has though, and is particularly happy when putting the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD processors, and laptops through their paces. He has a long-lasting Magic: The Gathering obsession but limits this to MTG Arena these days.