does overclocking really pay off

[MadTommy]

This is a post i made on the DSC forum...

I'd thought i'd share some info for anyone interested or doubting the performance a modest overclock can give you.

I'm running a modest overclock, a dual core E8400. Default it runs at 3Ghz, 18 months ago i overclocked it to 3.6Ghz. Very stable, no overheating, no fancy cooling.

A few days ago my BIOS reset itself without myself noticing, and set it back to factory default. (removed the overclock). This coincided with the latest Warthog patch release. Installed the patch and was getting terrible performance. My fps had reduced by 50%. Naturally i initially thought it was the patch. I reduced graphics setting but it made no difference. I was now getting 15 fps dropping to 5 every now and again, when i had been always been between 25 - 60 fps.

I noticed my overclock had been removed.. reinstated it through my BIOS save setting feature and my fps increased by about 70%!!! I went from getting 15 to 45fps on the exact same mission! From a 0.6 Ghz increase!!

My cpu is my bottelneck but i was amazed, i had, to be honest, never realise what a boost it was giving me in A10c.

My rig for reference.
E8400 stock 3Ghz - overclocked to 3.6 Ghz.
GTX 480 (1.5GB)
4 GB Ram (1066)
x-fi extreme music
SSD HD

All game settings on High except Water & Traffic on Medium.

Getting overclocking people!!!

[Urufu_Shinjiro]

One of the best places to lurk and learn about overclocking is at www.overclock.net.

[Flyby]

I last visited the site in July of last year. I'd forgotten about it! A great resource for sure.
Flyby out

[Codex]

Well I used to "overcook"


Even with manufactures now engineering their hardware to perform at “overcooked” specs, they still won’t provide a warrantee if you do over clock them. Plus, I personally hate the smell of burning plastic in the house and the sight of smoke coming from by PC. I won’t do that again … LOL


I now religiously pay for the best performance rather than try and make a lower spec’d component perform at a higher specs.

[louisv]

I overclocked my quad core from 2.66 to 3.2 GHz and fps in FSX was boosted by the same proportions.

If the graphics card is the bottleneck, like in most non-sim games, it will not happen until you change the card.

Know your bottlenecks...

[AndyJWest]

Hopefully, I'll be able to find out for myself when the custom build from Scan I've ordered finally arrives: an i7/950 system, overclocked to 3.80GHz from 3.06GHz. If it doesn't make any noticeable difference, I'll probably turn the overclocking off. No point in toasting the system for a few FPS, and this beast is going to use quite enough power anyway.

(Incidentally, if anyone else is thinking of ordering a system from Scan, don't take their estimated delivery times too seriously - they seem to work on Oleg time, and '10 working days' seems to equal a month. I'd have been prepared to accept this anyway if they'd been more realistic, but it is irritating to have to be given overoptimistic estimates time and again.)

[Urufu_Shinjiro]

Originally Posted by Codex

Well I used to "overcook"


Even with manufactures now engineering their hardware to perform at “overcooked” specs, they still won’t provide a warrantee if you do over clock them. Plus, I personally hate the smell of burning plastic in the house and the sight of smoke coming from by PC. I won’t do that again … LOL


I now religiously pay for the best performance rather than try and make a lower spec’d component perform at a higher specs.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, as I'm honestly curious, how in the world do you fry a system while overclocking? I've been overclocking since the AMD Thoroughbred days and never myself or known anyone personally who has fried anything. What happened? What did you do, and did you find out where it went wrong?

[335th_GRAthos]

I bet it was a GeForce 6800 which refused to go Ultra....

[Rattlehead]

Originally Posted by Urufu_Shinjiro

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, as I'm honestly curious, how in the world do you fry a system while overclocking? I've been overclocking since the AMD Thoroughbred days and never myself or known anyone personally who has fried anything. What happened? What did you do, and did you find out where it went wrong?

I can only imagine some people go too crazy with their voltages, not knowing the harm they're doing.
But personally I've also never had anything actually stop working as a result of overclocking, not permanently anyway.
(I did see some smoke coming from my old PC once, which was alarming, after a particularly stressful overclock. )

Nowadays I just leave everything at factory settings...

[TonyD]

Originally Posted by Rattlehead

I can only imagine some people go too crazy with their voltages, not knowing the harm they're doing.
But personally I've also never had anything actually stop working as a result of overclocking, not permanently anyway.
(I did see some smoke coming from my old PC once, which was alarming, after a particularly stressful overclock. )

Nowadays I just leave everything at factory settings...

I did once, but pre-Thoroughbred days. My son had a Duron 1 GHz in an A7V mobo that I was trying to get to 1.2 GHz, but pushed the FSB too far for the LAN controller (yeah, I know, it shouldn’t have been plugged in at the time ). I had to settle on 1150 MHz using a modified multiplier (remember the pencil trick?) which was a nice improvement over stock.

In reality there’s not a lot to gain making your cpu run faster, particularly in relation to game performance. There are some circumstances where you will see a difference, but I feel that the risks outweigh the relatively small improvement achieved. These days with unlocked multipliers it’s a lot easier, but there’s still a possibility of over-doing it, and you will only find that out too late. And it’s not necessarily the cpu that will fail, more likely something on the mainboard (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...d,2436-15.html)

Running components faster and/or at higher voltages than specified will shorten their life, but by how much is anyone’s guess. A mate ran an over-clocked GeForce 7800 reliably for nearly a year before it suddenly died, but we never established why.

I suggest that unless you know what you are doing and understand the risks involved, don’t over-clock! It could otherwise be an expensive lesson.