What's with all the overclocking?

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?

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)

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

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.

second

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and first.

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!

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.

I have read both sides of the phenomenon known as electron migration. I think if you benched my D805 @ 4.0ghz today it would be a little less than my D805 @ 4.0ghz a year ago when I first got it. Not due to any hardware issue, but just the slowing down of my XP install.

From what I have experienced, overclocking will damage a CPU or GPU, but it will happen either instantaneous or damn near instant. It will slowly boot one time, load windows ultra slow and two reboots later be dead.

JumpingJack would be a better suited person to explain how electron migration works and why, if at all, the performance could decline.

I would be interested to see how it would do in a different mobo of the same model. There may or may not be any proof or validity to this, but it seems that Athlons die slowly (or at least their max OC dies slowly) while Pentiums are more quickly. I have only had a few experiences and haven't researched it much, but that is what I have seen.

Chances are it is all just random and my above observation means zero.

This sounds like a Trolish thread, but I will reply anyway.
Overclocking is not a new trend, my 8088 was over clocked, my 486 dx4 100 was overclocked, my celeron 300a was overlcocked. It is not just more frames per second in games, I also do it to rip music, videos and edit photos and video. Why pay top dollar for a top performer when I can over clock for the 1/3 or 1/4 the cost?
Ever have your antivirus kick in for a scan when your plugging a way at an email, or playing a game? Ever download torrent files, surf the net and rip a movie or burn a dvd at the same time? These things no longer crush my computer since I have gone to a dual core.

no chance in hell, i love my c2d like a huckleberry pie

Ok if everyone in the world had a dual core cpu what percentage would actually use both cores on a regular basis? Call me old fashioned but I usually do one thing at a time. I never find myself burning a cd, downloading a movie, playing BF2 and surfing the net all at the same time.

But im sure it is nice to be able to.

Heck 100 years from now we might have bio-cpu's that evolve as needed. 100 cores not enough well the cpu just split and made another core......and it's a boy!

WRONG. OCing is mostly done as part of a pissing contest here and at every other enthusiast site on the web.

Back in the day, a celeron 300A was a good overclocker, and if you got lucky you could get a 50% overclock... But this was when CPUs really sucked, and OCing was somethign which actually made a remarkable improvement in the user experience.

These days the same simply connot be said: the user experience of computing on machine exceeding 3GHz is DEFINITELY NOT improved when you get the thing to 3.4 GHz.

That is why I've given up overclocking: today's machines are well fast enough for everything I do, including gaming.

The most important thing about PCs is now the noise - PCs need to be quiet. Of course, you find it hard to brag about how quiet your box is, and as it takes quite some research and nouse to achieve it, it is far more difficult than the default pissing contest of raising clock speeds.

With my system overclocked I can idle faster...
seriosly though..
I like overclocking because my system is a bit more responsive...
my compiles are 1 second faster... virus scans on new email i get won't make my HD content i'm playing stutter at all..
boot times.. who cares.. I never shut my machine down...

Now THAT would sell!! But its a long wait... I give it 40 yrs...

Exactly
Why wouldn’t you overclock.
When you bring up the fsb, bandwidth across the board increases.
Not just CPU clock speeds.
With the CD2, an increase of 200 MHz can give you a jump in memory bandwidth unlike any other processor to date.
So crank it up or shut it off.

isnt it sweet

Yea but what are your benchmarks in games and not those silly sandra and cpu score stuff? You might only get a few more fps when overclocking your cpu.

Then you need to look at the GPU and overclocking it not the cpu. Now if one of your cores can take over some of the job of gpu then cool that would be great and prob increase your fps a lot.

Until that happens if I burn a cd and it takes me a minute or longer I really don't care. I don't mind running a program and then getting up and getting a drink, take a dump, take a nap then come back and it's done!

I agree the computers now are great and you don't want a slow one but if it saves you 20 seconds overclocked then I don't get too excited about it.

I have overclocked before and then tested the computer using different applicaitons to check the speed and then you can brag to your friend how high a score you got but in real world applications most of the new cpus are just fine the way they are.

Well, ok. But that was the same line of reasoning why people didn't instantly switch to e-mail. Instant? It doesn't need to be instant! The post is fast enough!

And with applications like video encoding, you will see a linear increase in performance. If you can OC your computer 25%, now your encoding jobs take 25% less time. An hour job now only taking 45 minutes is nothing to sneeze at.

You seem content with your speed and that is fine. It is true a lot of people just OC as a contest, because OCing is fun, as is competition. However, there are people that do harness the power of their OC'ed machines so don't be so quick to dismiss OCing just because you don't have a use for it.

Overclocking will help people who have low budgets and rarely upgrade. For example, if I kept using my s754 clawhammer (can anyone think of a nickname for this, like sandiego = sandy? I like to think my 3000 still has a cool factor ) system as my main system, and a year down the track from now the cpu starts to really bottleneck my games (or whatever you do), instead of forking out a few hundred dollars which I cant afford in this example, I can OC and get a little more life out of the system. This cpu is kind of a bad example though since you wont get much out of it, considering I have it on an abit kv8-max3 (no agp/pci lock, ouch).

And my OCed X6800 whups your ass. =P

Lifespan issues only apply to overclocking that results in major heat generation. In cases, such as mine, hardly any additional heat is being created. The reason is that I'm not increasing the voltages any. I push my system to the fastest it will go on standard voltage and then leave it there. Reduced life span only applies to over-volting. For example, I bought one of the original Celeron 300mhz[with L2 cache] CPU's and OC'd it to 504mhz[FSB112mhzX4.5] and have been running at that speed since. I've never overvolted it. What it does for me has changed over the past 9 years[It's currently running as a linux firewall router] but for the most part was running 16 hours a day and now runs 24/7. It shows no signs if slowing down either. The same is true for my 1.4ghz P3. It has been running at 1.753ghz[FSB167mhzX10.5] since the day I bought it 4 years ago. If you are going to OC and have no intention of overvolting, then have no fear about ruining your parts. They will run just fine at whatever speed you discover to be stable. Some parts will OC better than others, but as long as you don't mess with the voltages you'll be good.

That said, depending on the parts and quality of the manufacturing process, you could "safely" raise the voltage by 5% to 10% without causing any long-term damage. For example, OC'ing an AMD Opteron, you can safely raise the voltage 5% and get an extra 30% OC out of it because of AMD's QC requirements. But with a P4, because Intel was already running them at close to their max speed threshold and had to keep the voltage as high as possible, raising the voltage on a given P4 was risky. The PentiumD is a different story, they have some headroom, so raising the voltage safely wasn't to difficult. The Core2's, I hear, have HUGH headroom for both overvolting and OC'ing. Still I personally will not overvolt my Core2 to push it higher until I'm ready to upgrade anyway.

The reality is that the quality of the parts you buy and whether or not you overvolt them will affect lifespan, not whether the parts are overclocked.

FYI; I'm running a Core2 6400[2.13ghz] at 2.67ghz on a 334mhz FSB. The temp of the CPU under load went up by only 2 degrees[34 degrees] C. The chipset on the mobo[Gigabyte 965p-DS3] went up by 3 degrees[41] C. None of the voltages were changed. I'm using the HS/Fan combo that came with the proc. My video card[7900GT] is being OC'd by 75mhz on the core and 124mhz on the ram. Temps on the card went up by 6 degrees[61 degrees] under load. Again no voltage changes on the card. The combination of OC's on my system led to an increase in performance of 38% on average in games and 43% in most other apps. THIS is why one would overclock his/her system.

I agree with those that say the hit on your CPU life is irrelevant.

But has anybody actually DOCUMENTED a reduction of life of overclocked components? And I don't mean where someone fried a CPU, I mean where someone reasonably OC and CPU or GPU and ran it 24/7 and compared it with the non-OC part?

I have run OC'ed computers 24/7 for over five years before upgrade and have noticed no degradation (except that caused by Microsoft...(-; ).

Granted if I reduced the average life of the components from 10years to 8years, I would never notice because I would have upgraded by then. Thus given the REAL useful life of computer components, the hit you take by overclocking is negligible.

Bottomline, if you know what you're doing, OCing gives you a performance gain for only the cost of your time.

Twitching, screen ghosts, excess heat output, slow performance, long load timing, etc.