Relive overclocking’s history with the legendary Charles ‘Fugger’ Wirth

If you can’t remember when the first discrete graphics cards hit the market, overclocking might not seem like a big deal to you. Diminishing returns are a fact of life with modern hardware, but two or three decades ago, tweaks and overclocks might get you as much as a 50 percent performance boost. Just ask Charles Wirth. These days he’s a member of the team at UL Solutions, the publisher of the Futuremark suite of benchmarking software. But if you’re part of the overclocking community, you know him simply as the legendary “Fugger.”

Charles took some time to talk with Gordon on the floor of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, ostensibly to talk about the latest UL benchmarking software, but really to shoot the breeze about the glory days of PC overclocking. Check it out in the latest PCWorld YouTube video.

Is there anything left for the layman overclocker in today’s PC market? Wirth thinks so. “There’s still more technology coming, there’s a lot of stuff with AI technology, and the integration of AI into the new processors. We’re actually trying to get ahead of that, and actually develop for the manufacturers to showcase those new features.”

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