People seem to be buying new processors and then overclocking them straight away. What's with this trend?

I mean, are we at a point whereby people think the dual core route is a bit of a waste - I mean, baring in mind quad core.

Are Intel and AMD going down the wrong route here?

How many people are overclocking for gaming use?

I find it odd as a long time ago AMD went 64 bit - where the hell are all the 64 bit games? Now that we are in dual and quad core territory, are we going to see games that utilise these cores? There is hardly a glut of 64 bit games - how a long ago did 64 bit processors arrive?

In a nutshell - who is all of this for? Are Intel and AMD focussing on gaming here or is there another motive for the cores?

How many of you are gamers and are trying to push these processors for games?

you seem to be stuck on the fact that only thing to use PC's for is gaming...

try all the aplications that can use multicore... and there are lots of them...

ocing is mostly done to increase overall perf of the rig for rendering/processing/encoding media

for games you'd have to "push" vga not the cpu(ocing cpu won't give you much of a fps gain)

Game developers are slow to catch on to coding 64-bit and multithreaded applications for several reasons. There is less money in it than say, professional development tools, so the incentive to innovate is less. It's also a fact that the CPU isn't often the limiting factor in a lot of these 3D games with lots of fancy effects, so optimizing it isn't a priority.

As for 64 bit, that's mostly due to the market. You need a 64 bit OS to run 64 bit games and right now Windows XPx64 has poor driver support so very few people use it. Therefore, why would they rewrite a whole lot of code to optimize a small percentage of their users performance? Even once Vista comes up pushing 64 bit more, there will still be a large amount of users on 32bit XP, and you want their money too. You can't simply alienate all 32 bit users.

Finally, I doubt most people OC new processors for games. I personally OC'ed my processor so that I could scale video resolutions using a post processor. The faster my clock speed, the higher the resolution I can scale to and more post processing effects I can apply. (The scaling has higher quality than simple 'zoom' scaling of graphics card).

Overclocking for me, and for most participants I suspect, is solely to get the most out of the components that I have shelled out my very-hard-earned cash for.

I am most happy with my OC 6800GT and OC 3700+ SanDiego.

And while on the topic of overclocking, I will build my next system early next year, based on Core2Duo E6600 and a 8800GTS (they will unlock the OC, once there are enough in the chain and, wait for it, the R600 hits the streets at the end of Jan...)

Basically, if you bought a car, and I said that if you give me ten minutes I will safely shave a second off the 0-60 and add ten mph to the top speed for nothing, I reckon you would accept. Especially if I showed you testimonials doing exactly that...

Bang-For-Buck FTW

Well, I am fishing for how many people are gamers.

You see, this whole multi-core idea is resulting in quad core (and beyond?). If this is of not much use to a gamer then I am wondering what the point is? There must be a fair percentage of PC owners that use them mainly for gaming.

So, is dual core/64 bit a waste? As a gamer, I might want a faster, single core, CPU. The question would really be the demand for this product.

The point is, the majority of the market isn't gamers. It is useful to some people.

Also, dual-core is useful if you run multiple programs while playing your games. Like say, if you are running Ventrilo, an RSS reader, uTorrent, Thunderbird, Firefox, and a game at the same time, dual core helps. That's one reason I like my dual core.

I overclock my CPU/GPU for more performance for my money and for the hobby of it. Cooling and tweaking timings, voltages and ratios to achieve optimal performance is fun for me. Along with many others.

Yes I game, yes I overclock to gain FPS.

second

Why, cause I can!

second

Third.



and first.

Why not, if you can get your system to go faster then why hold it back? Well you may not need overclocking to browse faster but in gaming it squeezes out a bit more performance. Sure it cuts down on the components lifespan but then again is wouldn't last that long until it gets outdated.

Word! Bringing down a components lifespan from 8 to 5 years is irrelevant. The poor Duo will have nothing on the Quantum Hexa-Nano in 2010, so who cares!

One thing I should ask, is that do you guys think performance decreases slowly over time, or does the processor just bomb out one day. ie. If you bench an OC'ed processor at time 0, then bench it again at time 0+5, which all other variables remaining constant, does the processor actually perform worse, even through its still working?

Agreed. Also, as mentioned above, we haven't seen many 64 bit games because almost all games are written for windows, which is only 32 bit (for now, not including 64bit xp). Once Vista is out, I am sure that games will start to be written (a year or so down the road) taking advantage of the 64 bit platform.

As for dual core support, game designers are taking advantage of this as we speak. They can't just jump into a new technology as soon as it comes out, they need to wait for some market acceptance. Valve has already announced that they will be putting out a patch for HL2 to allow it to take advantage of multi-core systems. It is only a matter of time before almost all games will be 64bit and multi-core capable.