AFAICT doing interesting but ultimately trivially complicated stuff as a youngster can still result in scholarships etc, Ahmed Mohamed comes to mind.

I’m truly sorry if my childhood anecdote has inadvertently spread misinformation on this topic :)

somebody else mentioned the possibility that the cooling did something to the crystal oscillator, but I think there are another two explanations that either alone or in combination might explain what happened: unreliable narrator (OP was very young when the memory was formed) and external influence - his dad or teacher might have done the overclocking which might have been beyond his understanding and therefore notice at the time.

either way there's no reason to take anecdotes uncritically.

It is in Bayesian reasoning.

> either way there's no reason to take anecdotes uncritically.

> Because in this thread there are only theoretical explanations why it cannot be

No, the explanations are referring to the mountain of evidence based on the physics of the chips and the known characteristics of the chips of the time. That's not theoretical, that past observations.

At any rate, sounds like a really fun high school project!

The 286 came out in 1982 but it wasn't until ~2000 (with the release of the Pentium 4) that thermal throttling was introduced.

From ~1995-2000 if the CPU got over temperature, your PC just turned off immediately. And prior to ~1995 if you ran a CPU without a heatsink it could overheat and destroy itself. We just had to be careful not to do that :)

I will leave it to history to judge if I truly earned that blue ribbon

You are stating that providing better cooling to a 286 improved it's performance in the terms of calculating faster.

This is, flatly, false. If you have a 286 clocked at 8mhz, it doesn't matter how much you cool it, it will still run at 8mhz, and still only execute the same number of instructions per clock.

To make a 286 perform more calculations per second, you MUST increase it's clock rate, directly, by installing a faster oscillator. Running at a high clock rate reduces the time each gate in the circuit has to settle to a state, high or low. This can cause the CPU to have what it experiences as "random" gate flips, that will eventually crash it. To fix this, you can increase the voltage, which can force the gates to stabilize faster. This creates more heat. This heat is what more cooling can extract.

In modern CPUs, the voltage, clock speed, and cooling can all be varied independently (within limits) to acheive whatever is desired: quietest/coolest performance, fastest clock, highest performance, etc.

This is not true on a 286.

If the CPU does not crash with a faster oscillator, extra cooling will not increase it's performance.