20-Year-Old Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 Overclocked to 4.5GHz Runs Modern Games

It's amazing what even vintage silicon can achieve when the hardware is mixed with modern day parts! The 20 year old Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 is now able to play modern AAA games after going through a massive amount of optimization and extreme overclocking. This shows the potential of vintage CPUs, even if just for gaming purposes as long as everything else is upgraded to modern standards.

Vintage CPU paired with modern parts plays Doom and GTA 5

At the heart of the build we have the Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 which is based on the NetBurst architecture and is manufactured with a 65nm process. The dual-core CPU has hyper threading and supports 4 threads. There's 2MB of L2 cache per core.

Specifications

• Architecture: NetBurst
• Process Node: 65nm
• Cores/Threads: 2 Cores / 4 Threads
• Base Clock: 3.73 GHz
• L2 Cache: 2MB per core

Originally it had a 3.73GHz base clock. Thermal design power was 130W. The vintage CPU is powered by an Asus Rampage Formula motherboard equipped with an X48 chipset.

PreslerTech managed to overclock the CPU to 4.5GHz. They also had to bump up the core voltage to roughly 1.336V. 8GB of OCZ DDR2-750 memory is used in the build with tight CL4-4-4-12 timings. NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti takes care of the GPU duties.

For storage, it's a Samsung 870 Evo combined with an Intel 750 NVMe SSD. The OS is Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC, which is used to reduce background processes.

Doom (2016) was launched along with GTA 5, Battlefield 4 and World of Warcraft Shadowlands. No crashes were encountered. Even though the framerates were low, we get steady frame intervals which made it a comfortable and acceptable gaming experience.

It's also a proof that air cooling is enough for extreme overclocking even on vintage architectures as long as thermal constraints are met. The CPU was purchased for 500 EUR (roughly $561) from the Hong Kong second hand market.

This is a real world example that checks the compatibility of retro hardware with modern software environments. It proves that the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 is capable of running modern game engines even though it's old. The experiment shows a great example of how you can pair hardware to keep vintage CPUs alive.