You need a bigger case 

Amusingly these pics are less scary than the other ones 

I am somewhat obsessed with cable management and airflow in my builds and space isn't an issue for me so I tend to favor larger cases. I am working on an mATX scratch build atm though but not gotten much past cutting out a few templates in cardboard. Still trying to hash out placement of all the components to keep it as small as possible while maintaining decent airflow. Once I have a design finalized I will send the templates to get cut in acrylic, if I get that far 

Thanks for sharing  

I don't know if I will find the time to get my design done but I am determined to complete a scratch build one day 

Everyone is welcome here, well everyone except spammers, trolls and flamers, those I take great pleasure in banning 

Keep the awesome posts and pics coming 

Some things AMD has done right imo:

1. Marketing the Zen lineup years ahead of release, this means many AMD fans will have been holding off for Zen so will likely result in a boom of sales close to release.

2. This is probably not intentional but still plays in AMD's favor, the fact that AMD has not had a new socket in so very long means people upgrading will feel they have really gotten their money's worth out of their current systems.

3. Switching to more conventional cores with Zen, this means a more even playing field that isn't reliant on different usage examples for proper comparison between AMD and Intel. While Bulldozer and it's derivatives were very successful in their own right they compared poorly to intel from day one because software never really caught up to the technology and even when it started to it was typically only optimized for up to 4 cores (game engines are the main culprit here). Even today many game titles do not properly optimize for more than 4 cores which means half of an 8 core FX CPU is being under or improperly utilized. In the few games that are optimized to take advantage of the 4 module 8 thread FX we see very competitive performance with intel. Zen will remove the "in the few titles" from the equation and allow AMD to compete directly in all titles. This is assuming they live up to the rumors and hype, at least largely.

4. Merging APUs and regular CPUs onto a single socket, this will likely encourage motherboard sales in a big way.

I could go on but from where I sit, AMD looks poised to really shake up the market when ZEN hits, it would be tragic if despite all this they fall short.

I had overclocked 8086s before that but from 4 to 8mhz or 8 to 16mhz but that hardly seemed impressive and made little difference when you couldn't even run windows 3.1 on them. I also didn't know what the stock clocks on them were so for all I knew that was normal.... My SX 25 was my first real overclock on a current(ish) system.

The next system I really got excited about was centered around one of these bad boys:

 

The notorious (for the time) Celeron 300a. I got mine up to 700mhz with some very creative cooling but ran it at 633mhz with a monstrous heatsink and a pair of 120mm delta fans pilfered from an old server for day to day use. I don't think I have seen another CPU overclock to more than 200% of it's stock frequency since then. I kept that system for years before giving it to my wife (then girlfriend). 

Around the same time I discovered AMD's K6 range of CPUs, most notably the K6 III which could run (all K6s did) on older pentium socket 7 or "Super Socket 7" boards as were later released with an AGP slot and SDRAM support. I had a bunch of these as they allowed me to revive much older systems and have them perform as well as and sometimes better than the more current Pentium II/III.

Sadly, all my best overclocking CPUs have always been intel despite my love of AMD. I don't consider myself a fanboi of either though, I am a fan of the tech itself and typically own both   

The Celeron 300a (Mendocino) was a Slot 1 CPU so it was a cut down version of the Pentium II. The whole slotted CPU design came about because of cache shortages so CPU manufacturers got around it by using a daughter board system with different cache ICs that could be found more easily. Once the shortages were over we saw the birth of the first Pentium 3 (Coppermine) Socket 370 CPUs. 

I used a high end server board (I forget the model now) for my 300a which had jumpers that allowed me to manually set the BCLK all the way up to 166mhz via jumpers on the board, that combined with some insane voltage mods and cooling got my 700mhz result that stood as a record briefly among my co workers at the time. You have to bare in mind this was some years later and we didn't care if we burned up the CPUs we were playing with  My cooling solution involved coating the entire motherboard and CPU+heatsink in thick non conductive grease and encasing the entire CPU in ice except for it's slot edge connector. I then submerged the entire motherboard in an ice-water filled bucket turned it on and waited for the sparks to fly. They didn't and I briefly got to see the glorious 700mhz figure on the post screen before the water began to boil and I shut it off   We must have fried a dozen or so old boards experimenting with various overclocks and cooling methods in those days. If I had known about LN2 back then...... Interestingly HWbot only has 2 Celeron 300a entries of 700mhz and over, that was one hell of a CPU, I wish I still had it. I need to correct my last post, I ran mine at 533mhz 24/7 not 633.... typo.... Most hit 450mhz easily even on stock cooling. You also have to bare in mind we didn't have access to advanced coolers back then, it was either stock, slightly better than stock or completely home brew  I think I was in my late teens/early 20s back then and a little too careless with my kit now that I look back on it 

I was so frustrated when one of my co workers managed 733mhz on his AMD K6 III 550, we were trying to see if any of us could get close to the 1ghz of the as yet unavailable at the time Pentium III coppermine 1ghz CPU that had just been released. He ended up winning the competition and a month of Friday afternoons off. Our boss was a blast and always came up with fun/crazy team competitions and team building exercises. I still maintain it wasn't fair, 550mhz to 733mhz was nothing compared to 300 to 700mhz 

This little guy only manages about 4.4ghz before voltages and temps get out of hand, even using an AIO Corsair H105. My Z170 Pro4s is about the equivalent to your Z97 Anniversary but from the skylake lineup. I have added beefier VRM cooling to it but it hasn't opened any doors regarding overclocking unfortunately. It does look better tho....

Pure win!

Intel does some great things with their chipsets and socket iterations but they are not budget friendly and certainly could stand to maybe switch to 3 generations per socket. Given they have given up on the tick/tock mythos it would make sense to introduce one more generation per socket. At least that is my opinion. 

I have always gone for one of the 2 basic formulas

1. Bang for buck

2. Longevity

If I had the cash for a more powerful setup I would typically go with intel, much as sockets change more often I would have still been more or less set today even with an i7 2600k. If budget was limited however then AMD offered more for less, at least till intel eclipsed them completely.