Continued Life from Great OCs...

Kind of curious, how many of you hold out for along time by highly overclocking "older" components and setups?

I am mainly speaking CPUs and RAM, but I guess anything qualifies.

Personally, I always try to buy the very best at the time that I can afford in hopes it will last years to come.

In late 2014, I went X99 and snagged a 5930k and 16GB of quad channel ram (4×4). My CPU has been running a summer OC of 4.5Ghz at 1.33Vcore and a winter OC of 4.6Ghz at 1.36Vcore for that long. RAM is at 2400mhz (crappy IMC on mine), but my memory is at 13-13-13-26 @1T and I run the DDR4 at 1.24V with SA voltage offset of +0.1.

I still don't feel limited at all in games and get great frame rates. I recently got a 2080Ti after a 1080 SLI setup and it runs great. Shortly after a buddy of mine also snagged the exact same 2080Ti but on a 7980XE setup I helped him overclock a year or two ago to 4.5Ghz with 32GB of 3200Mhz RAM. I never helped him tune his RAM though. His setup is a beast overall.

We recently compared benchmarks that look more specifically at gaming (Superposition, Valley, 3dmark...) and I was quite surprised I was within 100~200 points of him. In valley, I actually crushed his score by 400. All settings we aimed at 2K resolution. I tweaked my RAM timings further to 12-12-12-24 @1T and then beat his Superposition score too. Although that required 1.3V on the RAM, so I backed to my previous OC at 1.24V to play it safe as I read rumors that haswell-e's weak IMC could shit at 1.3V for DDR4. Not sure what to believe there...

Anyway, curious too see where others stand too. Pretty sure I have tweaked mine to the max and feel I can hold out at least another year or more.

Discuss!!!

I think most people of past years overclock right off the bat, so there's really no room to push any farther.

dmdtobe said:

I think most people of past years overclock right off the bat, so there's really no room to push any farther.

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Exactly, push it all the way right away. Why leave untapped potential?

I agree, although I notice over the years, I get maybe 90% of the OC potential but then as I get bored, I end up tweaking further until its literally topped off. I guess what I am getting at is, how many people who do OC feel it keeps them ahead of the curve for several generations of hardware?

I sort of have the itch to possibly go with the best AMD Ryzen 3 or possibly Intel 10 depending on how things shape up. But at the same time, I'm having a hard time seeing the need for gaming based on how things are still performing on my older platform. I imagine those with 6 or 7th generation may even feel more so.

I had an Intel Pentium 4 2.4c that i got up to 3.0ghz on an old Vapochill™ .. I'm having a hard time running 3DMark on it though ..and it takes a couple weeks to finish Cinebench.

Anymore though .. at least with AMD .. you are not going to see a whole lot of gains from OC'ing as they do a good job of "topping off" themselves already .. better the cooling better the self OC'ing they'll do

Back in 06' when I had a Q6600 quad. I used it for a few years without overclocking. Once I started to see that the build wasn't keeping up with newer games, I started overclocking to keep it running. I didn't oc the GPU (8800 GT), but the Q6600 was a beauty oc'ed.

I plan on keeping my 9900k and 2080Ti at factory settings unless I see some improvement with oc'ing on programs I'll be using. it'll be nice to overclock over time as needed.

dmdtobe said:

I think most people of past years overclock right off the bat, so there's really no room to push any farther.

Click to expand...

I have been OC'ing my C2Q to 3.2GHz since day 1, back in 2008...

Spent the last few days overclocking and tweaking the timings on my DDR4 for fun beyond my previous OC. Managed to gain 8% increase in performance amazingly! This is not only across benchmarks, but in game benchmarks matched the 8% exactly! I even tuned the secondary timings which also added a slight increase. Managed to get 2800Mhz stable using the 125Mhz strap on my 5930k. Got my timings to 14-14-14-28 @1T using 1.28V on the ram. Only had to increase my SA voltage by .110V. So in theory, I could probably push the IMC more on the 5930k. For this chip though, not many get to 3000 or 3200. Seems gains would be somewhat minimal as I noticed the jump from 2666 to 2800 was less than my jump from 2400 to 2666.

Also, I jumped to X99 pretty much at release, so my Quad RAM was technically only rated for 2800Mhz. Went all these years unable to get the 125Mhz strap stable and finally pulled it off because I got bored and wanted to see if I could get another year or 2 out of this system and not limit my video card... lol.

I'm still running i7 920 @ 3.8GHz. Still going strong. Only problems are because it's such an old system with slower SATA, no USB3, no Blue Tooth, etc.

My overclocked parts don't get retired they get handed down to family so I can see how they fare once they've been retired/replaced. Cpus haven't shown much degradation and they are still hitting their clocks. Though I generally speaking bench hard when I first get a chip but am more conservative with clocks 24/7.