- 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. Xsplit makes powerful streaming PC apps for streamers, vloggers, and more. Check out their VCam app to change or blur your background
without a greenscreen. Learn more at the end of the video. (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. Xsplit's VCam can remove, replace, and blur your background
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know the difference between you and your background and you can customize the background to pretty much anything you want. VCam works with other
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in the video description. - 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.
My fac line from that video was "but there is another, even geekyer reason" deadpan "its doom . we're running doom."
I hate this 'port' of doom because it really is not doom. It's not even as feature complete as wolf3d.
Hell, there's a really good 'port' of wolf3d to the 84. Much better than this game.
I wonder if you could get a fax machine to run DOOM...
Would you continually fax a certain frame to the player depending on what their doing I the game?
I now want to know if a water cooled fax machine is faster than a stock fax machine...
Hah! I didn’t even realise that was Linus. Wow. He’s rocking that beard!
I actually wonder if this is allowed in the MATHCOUNTS rules. This could be quite an advantage if it graphs/runs programs twice as fast, which can actually slow you down.