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