Very Real Tech Pics

It wasn't really even a 'flaw' or 'exploit'. It was more a matter of 'if your chip can handle it, go for it assuming you have good cooling and know what you're doing.

Everything was more or less running at a "safe" speed so that the largest number of chips would be stable at, though it was known to pretty much everone that you could easily overclock for a little more performance.

I mean, there were boards built specifically to overclock, but they were more spendy. Sometimes you could get a cheaper board to overclock with a trick.

It wasn't until overclocking became widespread enough that chipmakers would try to limit it to sell some chips as higher speed and premium pricing. That's when it started getting locked down.

Was a sweet time when you could buy a budget chip that was identical silicon to the faster chips and just tune it to get the same, if not better, performance for cheap.