- Did you know that you can overclock a graphing calculator
for fun and profit?
- Yeah, so we called up Texas Instruments and we were like,
hey guys, can you send us some calculators to overclock?
So they sent us this one, which,
this doesn't look like a calculator.
I think it does.
- [Linus] That looks exactly like a calculator,
what are you talkin' about?
- But it doesn't look like the calculator.
- No, it's not the calculator.
So, we actually had to go digging through
(clears throat) Alex's sentimental drawer,
where we found the very TI-84+
that got him most of the way through engineering school.
- And also most of this job.
- So I guess what you're tryin' to say is
you'd like for us to not break it.
- Yes.
- Well, good luck with that.
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(beeping)
(warm electronic music)
Before we go any further,
we should probably address
why anyone would want to overclock a graphing calculator.
Now one obvious reason is that
when you enter a more complex function in them,
they can actually take a hot minute to spit out the results.
But there are some even more fun
and geekier reasons than that.
- Doom, playing Doom on your calculator in class.
- Turns out that's a thing you can do.
And the more you overclock it, the faster it'll run.
Doy.
Of course, to quantify the benefit of our experiment here,
we're going to have to set a baseline.
So let's get Doom installed on this puppy
and see how she runs.
- All right, so, in order to get programs
on your calculator, you just get TI Connect,
it has not changed since I used it in high school.
Go to send to device.
All right, so, calculator overclocking,
and here we have Doom 2, runs a bit better,
so let's toss that on.
- Wow, that animation.
I remember the pages, and when you deleted things,
how the page would just pff.
Oh my gosh. - Sick!
- Yeah, this is pretty slow to render new frames.
Oh, I think I got a new, oh, pistol.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
Hey, back up to 45s, oh, he hit me.
Yeah, these frames render a little on the slow side,
I can see how this experience could be enhanced
with a faster calculator.
That's it, eh?
That's the brain? - Yup.
We need to find out how much power it's drawing so that,
you know, you can't design a thermal system
without knowing how much power you're drawing.
So, first thing we need to do is power it.
- That's flux, you're just gonna solder leads to it.
Positive and negative, let's tin some wires here, suckas.
This is nice,
normally they don't let me use the soldering iron.
- Well, oh yeah.
The soldering that's coming in a bit, you are not doing.
You can do this one.
Like, look at the landing pad,
you're not doing the harder ones.
Look at this that I did this morning.
- [Linus] That is pretty impressive.
- [Alex] Yeah.
- [Linus] Assuming that it actually still works.
- [Alex] I have no clue.
- Okay, so let's see if I did it right.
Ey, it's alive!
- Yay.
- He was a little nervous, I saw him.
- Okay, so, I was slightly concerned about this.
It's drawing so little power
that it's not registering in our power supply here.
- [Linus] Hmm, yes, mmhmm.
- So we're gonna have to calculate it a different way.
One moment.
- So all we need to do is hook up to our multimeter,
which should tell us how much current we're drawing.
.001 amps.
- Can you change the range
and see if we can get that a bit more precise?
- No. (laughs)
You know what, though?
I bet what we could do
is actually do something on the calculator,
so I'm gonna take that from you
and I will sanitize my hands after.
And then you do something.
Like run Doom, for example.
- Okay, so we're gonna graph now.
Oh yeah, 0.013 is the max.
0.0912 watts of heat to dissipate
for the total thing, including the display.
- So .1 watts. - Yup.
- I think we've got this. (laughs)
And we're takin' this one step further.
- [Alex] What do you think the temperature's gonna be?
- 20, 25 degrees.
- I was thinking 24 and a half.
(laughing)
- It's heatin' up, boys, I can see it.
- It's integrating now.
- You got the 24.5?
24.5, I saw it, 24.6!
(shouts) I win!
Whoo!
Meaningless victory!
- Only if you round, though.
I was closer.
- Dang it.
Now that we have our baseline,
what do we need to overclock this thing?
As you can imagine, there isn't exactly a bios
that you can go into and change the multiplier.
- A wild Anthony appears!
In our calculator and many older electronics,
the CPU speed is regulated by a resistor capacitor
or RC oscillator.
We'll be simplifying a bit here,
so if you want a bit more of a complete explanation,
go ahead and watch this excellent video from Ben Eater.
Basically how an RC oscillator works
is you use a transistor or an op amp
to compare the voltage between this capacitor
and some voltages we set.
So, when the voltage of the capacitor
is below a certain threshold,
power is applied and then it is removed
once it hits that threshold,
creating an oscillating motion
which gives us the clock of our CPU.
To overclock in that case,
all we need to do is
swap this resistor to change the threshold,
which gives us a much faster rise and fall.
We're gonna us that with our TI-84
to increase our clock speeds.
- That sounds easy enough
until you see the size of the resistors
that we're dealing with.
We need to replace R07D and R08D,
so these are the two right here.
And as you can probably tell
by how massive these tweezers look,
they are super tiny and I am not excited about this.
Now this is the part that has the greatest risk
of just completely killing everything.
So I'm going to have to use the hot air gun
while pulling on the resistor
and hope that the resistor that I want to come off comes off
and no other bits do.
If I slip, then I might destroy it.
It worked, I got it off.
Right there, those are the pads
that I have to land the solder on.
And this is the size of the resistor.
In theory, we should be able to overclock it
with just swapping one.
So, what about we only swap one,
see if it works, and then we can swap two
and we'll have a larger range of potential overclocking.
After the cameras turned off last night,
I kept on working on this.
We had a bit of a problem.
You know how like you tried it as well.
- [Linus] Yep, yep.
- [Alex] Nothing was sticking the pads.
- [Linus] Turns out they were gone.
- [Alex] Yeah, totally gone, no pads at all.
Ripped them right off.
- Fortunately, there is another resistor right next to it
that happens to be wired up in parallel,
so we were able to solder onto that one,
attach the potentiometer,
and overclocking works now?
- Yeah, it works.
It's not 100% stable at the moment.
- Well, that's overclocking for you.
- Yeah, and I think that the reason for that is that like--
- It needs water cooling.
- It needs water cooling and also like,
it's a resistor capacitor thing
that makes this whole clock circuit work.
And with these long leads here,
we're adding capacitance.
So, why don't we shorten these to like their final length?
- Got it.
- It should be a lot better.
- To make sure I understand properly,
it is your intention to continue using this calculator
in its water-cooled overclocked state, correct?
- Oh yeah, it's like, it's my calculator
and it's now it's going to be
maybe the coolest calculator in the world.
- And I'll be building the most ridiculous
water-cooling loop you ever did see.
- [Alex] Absolutely perfect, would you look at that?
- [Linus] Final block assembly, here we go.
- [Alex] We're also gonna have to make these leads shorter
and the other, thicker leads much shorter.
- [Linus] Well, how short do you want it?
- [Alex] Let's not make it much shorter
so that we can shorten it later
when we know how long it needs to be exactly.
- [Linus] This is the overclocking dial,
you better not bump that too far by accident.
- [Alex] A bump will be like 300 MHz.
- [Linus] How are we gonna solder it on, even?
- [Alex] What do you mean?
- [Linus] Well, it's gonna have to be long enough
that we can get at it before we close it.
Okay, we should be able to move on it.
Or we shouldn't have cut it,
we should've just--
- [Alex] Yeah, we probably shouldn't have cut it.
- I knew it, I had such a bad feeling about it.
- [Alex] Oh, that's quite a good tape job.
- Thank you. - Thank you, Linus.
If anything was gonna go horribly wrong,
it already would have. (knocking)
- Yeah, you better do that.
Better find the hardest wood possible
and knock on it for days.
I think this RGB reservoir sphere
might be the most German thing I've ever filled with water.
Well, I forgot that you had the CPU block
and these tubes were just open on the table
and I was sitting here filling the reservoir,
real focused on doing a great job of pouring
and the table is covered in water now.
The good news is I think I've got
a better idea for how to fill it now.
Ohp.
- [Alex] Just look at the block size
compared to what we're actually cooling.
- [Linus] That is about as riced out
as a calculator could be.
(laughs)
- [Alex] Ohp, there we go--
- All right-- - It's definitely working now.
- [Linus] Whoa, hey, oh, there you go.
Is it actually circulating water in there, though?
- [Alex] It doesn't look like it.
- [Linus] Well, we'd better go fast,
we don't want it to overheat
while there's no water flow.
- Water's coming through.
- Oh, okay, (blows) good enough.
This thing's horrible, don't buy it.
- [Alex] She did it, yes!
(laughing)
We have a water-cooled calculator.
- [Linus] We do, yup.
- [Alex] Absolutely amazing.
- You know, the funny thing is
we're gonna go and play Doom again
and it took so long to get this done.
I'm not remember if there's any difference,
I don't think.
This might actually be running faster.
- [Alex] Oh, it definitely is.
- It's actually like noticeably faster.
This like dramatically exceeds my expectations.
Look at this, like, I can actually kinda move around.
That's crazy!
- Because that difference is from
16 to 18.7 MHz.
We can try and get just a tiny bit more
and see what it's like.
I'm doing a live speed increase.
Is it still running?
- [Linus] Yup!
- [Alex] Okay, let's just try
and take it a tiny bit further.
- Oh yeah, it's faster.
It's faster loadin' that map there, son.
Whoo, look at her go, boys!
- All right, let's take it just a tiny bit further.
Let's see when it becomes unstable.
- [Linus] Wow, look how quickly it's loading now.
- [Alex] Oh yeah.
- [Linus] That's, like, this is a big difference.
- It seems to be taking it.
Let's just push it until it's, you know, not stable anymore.
- [Linus] These are basically loading pretty much instantly.
Wow!
(laughs)
- 26.8, damn! (laughing)
So, the reason why it's getting so garbled
is definitely because-- - It's not stable.
- [Alex] It's not stable, then also it's like,
the flash for some of the cycles is just not there.
- 26 MHz.
- That's a whole 10 MHz faster than before.
- It's 10 million Hz!
If you guys enjoyed this video,
you might also enjoy the series
where Alex and I go through the grueling process
of water-cooling a Red 8K camera.
That one was very frustrating,
but as long as it's entertaining for you guys,
it's totally worth it, right?
- Yeah. - Right.
I wasn't sure what he was gonna say.
- I'd like to thank everyone that helped us out on this,
particularly the people on the Cemetech forums.
R.S. Barges, AKA Dr. Dinar,
and Christopher Michael, AKA CermMarten.
Also, VirtualFlatCAD for the sick TI-84 model
and of course, Texas Instruments for the well,
the calculators that we didn't end up using.
But they still sent them, it was nice.
- Thanks to Xsplit for sponsoring today's video.
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- I'm very happy about this.
It's my new favorite thing.
- You know what you should totally do
is pull that stupid (bleep) manufacturers
say "water-cooled RAM" when it just like has water in it
and just put plugs in it
and just fill the block with water.
- Oh yeah, that was my plan. - Aw, nice, I love it.