Anyone else not give a single hoot about overclocking

It's not that I don't enjoy the hobby. I still read about hardware all the time, and read reviews and benchmarks. But I need stability overall. I still build annually with whatever I can afford.

I just miss the duron days. Long live my 2500+ Barton core.

And my Celeron 300a. I miss you guys. Back when I could overclock and actually feel the difference, not just in synthetic benchmarks.

everyone probably had one of those! :)
 
I loved overclocking my Tualatin Pentium 3, still do, it runs 1.7Ghz no worries.

However when it comes to newer machines, my need to overclock has been waining since the advent of x58. I just don't find it's necessary anymore.
 
i still enjoy finding my gears max stable. i just dont run my rig with said oc 24/7 anymore. i save my bios settings and usually just run my rig at stock for the most part unless im benching something. i agree with most in that ocing just isnt as exciting as it used to be.
 
I haven't cared about overclocking for over 10 years. I'm in the low-powered silent PC club now. But there were four huge factors that all came together.
.
1) I don't game anymore. I just don't have the time.
2) CPU's are much more powerful these days unlike the PII or K6 days where every bit counted. I just buy a better MB+CPU combo if needed, or bump up the video card.
3) Been there done that - know how to do it - not much fun anymore. Other things to take up my time now.
4) Some of my PC's stay on 24/7 now, so low powered and quiet is important. Squeezebox, Plex, IP Camera NVR and things like that.

/get off my lawn
 
I’ve spent quite some time OCing my 6700k back in the day. Didn’t get much out of it and just settled on [email protected] with it being a mediocre chip even after delid. I don’t see that much benefit from spending time on benchmarks and stability testing if you’re just a user tbh, so I might just not bother with OCing for my next platform.
 
To you guys saying you’ve spent so much time on OCing and don’t have time for it...

I’m confused. Finding your system limits takes like 2-3 hours of tweaking and then some time letting the stress testing run. I spend far more time updating BIOSs, patching, loading drivers etc.

Every now and then you’ll have to research chipset / processor architecture to get the gist of what needs to change or a particular process gen’s ideal voltage limits, but it’s super easy stuff. This is made out to be some tireless saga by some good grief.

So much tangible performance left on the table.

A small one-time time investment for years of use.
 
I'm with the op regarding a silent PC.
Its a living room PC, gaming from the couch on a projector, its got to be quiet to keep the peace with the other half.
To keep noise down it is housed inside a coffee table with an air gap under the surface to allow easy escape of hot air.
My 6700K is watercooled with the radiator underneath one end of the table cooled by 2x140mm silent fans.
The 1080ti has an Accelero Xtreme III cooler fitted with cold air ducted from the underside of the other end of the table via 2x 140mm silent fans.
My ram/chipset has a silent 120mm fan moving air around.
... however its clocked as high as it can.

My Corsair LPX 3000 CL15 runs at 3733MHz CL17.
The delidded 6700K is currently at 4.6GHz but it has a lid with an uneven underside which limits the overclock. So a NCore V1 delidded waterblock will be arriving in August.
My GPU runs over 2GHz.
All silent.

GPU overclocking speaks for itself, the faster the better.
CPU overclocking matters for high framerates and even for 60fps with games like Witcher 3.
Ram overclocking helps keep minimum framerate high which is my main reason for overclocking, aside from the fun of it.

Why not have your cake and eat it? :D
Its practical as much as it is a fun hobby.
 
I have a i7-7700K with a Corsair H150i Pro.

Don't really see the need to O/C.
 
The difference between my 5930k at 3.7GHZ and 4.5GHZ 4.1Uncore was worth it.
Tightening timings and speed on my RAM was worth it.
The system feels capable at 4K now vs how it would be at stock.

I have a i7-7700K with a Corsair H150i Pro.

Don't really see the need to O/C.
That cooler is begging you to OC....
 
I used to enjoy it but gave up really because I gave up for the most part on pc gaming. I got tired of companies like EA giving me a giant middle finger when I bought their pc games and moved away from it. Stuff like battlefield 1942 having a demo that played amazing and the boxed copy was clearly 6 months back on code and unplayable on either a amd system or pentium 4(can't remember which it was but I had the one it wouldn't work on). EA's response was fuck you the patch is coming(it took a month and by that point I had given up). The next BF game game out and it was like they didn't patch any of the bugs from the 1942 code. Steam which sucked in the beginning(yes it works fine now) where we had to reschedule clan matches because multiple people couldn't join counter strike source because steam wouldn't let us in. Horrible DRM like starforce that fucked up my notebook to the point I had to reload it(luckily before I spend 300 bucks on a new dvdrw drive for it thinking it was bad). The entire fuck it and ship the product, lets let the consumers be beta testers and we will patch later ideal that took over at a lot of publishers. That and the massive issue with cheating in a lot of online games. The xbox 360 signaled the death of most pc gaming for me. Sure it was DRM loaded but you almost never noticed it. For the most part it just worked.

Hell my current desktop is a dell. I didn't feel like building something when the dell ended up being about the same price. It does have a 1070 in it so I do play a few games from time to time but I've mostly gone to consoles. Far less cheating and many of my friends have migrated as its just easier. Many don't have room for a nice gaming pc setup anyway as they don't have a home office for it so it works well.

Another thing that has done it in for me. I work with computers(mostly servers but still) all day. I don't really want to screw with them at home. I just want the stuff to work and don't care to tinker with it.

At one time overclocking was difficult. Now all you have to do is Google the basic voltage range for vCore and do one or two other things and your all set. With some setups you can have an application figure this all out for you. Albeit, the applications are more conservative than I'd like but I understand the reasons behind it.

I remember having to look around for water cooling parts meant that you went to an automotive store to grab a heatercore as that was one of the best options. Water pumps were not designed for computer users and had to be sourced elsewhere. That and having to clear the cmos or screw with jumpers if you pushed it too far. Now its far easier.
 
That cooler is begging you to OC....

I mean, to some extent, the H150i is helping with clock speeds. My i7-7700K pretty much can sit at 4.2 GHz turbo indefinitely. Currently, I haven't had the need for more clock speed. On the contrary, I have a need for more cores (with similar single threaded performance). And aside from some random core unlocks from AMD in the past (with the Phenom II), unlock core isn't going to happen.

I do have a i9-7900X as a workstation with a H100i v2, but frankly, putting load on that made the system quite loud, even with a slight OC. I figure it needs a delidding.
 
I will still overclock, but I am just going for max freq. at stock voltages.

My problem is that I don't know when to stop LOL.

Overclocking is worth it but a wild overclock is not worth the extra 5% performance over a mild overclock.
 
gains use to be much more significant. t-bred [email protected] to 2.5ghz; pentium d [email protected] to 4.0ghz; core 2 [email protected] to 3.2ghz; core 2 [email protected] to 3.6ghz; i7 [email protected] to 4.0ghz; i7 [email protected] to 4.9ghz; i7 [email protected] to 4.5ghz all were an eye-opening experiences and delivered significant improvements if you were big into ripping dvds and blurays.

It's not just the gains, it's the fact you used to be able to take a low dollar CPU and get identical performance of a top tier CPU. Take the infamous Celeron 300A. It costs $150 and performed almost identically (300A @ 450) to the P2-450, which costs $600.

From looking at the list you provided, as time goes on, you need a higher tier of CPU just to O/C to top tier, mostly due to core counts and better binning. My i7-7700K will never equal a i9-7900X and that will never equal an i9-7980XE. Getting the performance of top tier CPU's by overclocking is dead.
 
Depends. Single-threaded performance, you can still best a top-tier CPU with a lower one.
As the core counts go up, the freq ceiling goes down.
If your workload doesn’t scale well past 4-6 cores, then a decent OCd “measley” i7 is great.
 
gains use to be much more significant. t-bred [email protected] to 2.5ghz; pentium d [email protected] to 4.0ghz; core 2 [email protected] to 3.2ghz; core 2 [email protected] to 3.6ghz; i7 [email protected] to 4.0ghz; i7 [email protected] to 4.9ghz; i7 [email protected] to 4.5ghz all were an eye-opening experiences and delivered significant improvements if you were big into ripping dvds and blurays.


My first cpu was an e-2160 (Poor man's Conroe) overclocked from 1.8ghz to 3.2 ghz. Today's CPUs do 90% of the work for you.
 
To you guys saying you’ve spent so much time on OCing and don’t have time for it...

I’m confused. Finding your system limits takes like 2-3 hours of tweaking

thats 2-3 hours im not balls deep in my husband or spawn camping some noob

Computers used to be all i was before HIM. now i need stability for the time i get to myself- it just needs to work.

specs & performance outside of OC is more than enough
 
dexvx, you're not wrong but you're not completely right either. the number cpus and prices within a product stack vary and fluctuate from generation to generation. amd x2 939 socket launched with 5 cpus priced from $300-1000. pentium d launched with 4 cpus from $150-600. core 2 duals launched with 5 cpus priced from $180-1000. core 2 quads launched with 2 cpus from $500-900. gen1 i7 with 3-channel memory launched with 6 cpus from $300-1000. in many of these cases the cheapest cpu was able to oc well beyond the clock of the $1000 chip. sandy i7 with 2-channel memory launched with 3 cpus priced from $300-320. that $20 difference gets you from 3.4ghz to almost 5.0ghz. you reckon the 20 bucks is worth it? your i7 kaby on socket 1151 unfortunately represents a half decade lazy streak for intel.
 
thats 2-3 hours im not balls deep in my husband or spawn camping some noob

Computers used to be all i was before HIM. now i need stability for the time i get to myself- it just needs to work.

specs & performance outside of OC is more than enough

Alright, congratulations - you are gay and proud.
 
As much as I enjoy the exercise of building and tinkering with a desktop, given that I sit in MS Excel most of the day and YouTube and [H] in a browser the rest of the time, there's no point in overclocking all the time for me anymore. That's just wasted power fo have the OC on all the time. That was one of the reasons I went with a 1700 when I was doing my AMD build - the low TDP @ stock speeds.

If and when I do game, IO make sure my GPU is enough to play the games I want, at the resolutions I'm at (1080 or 1440). Right now, the Titan Xp SLI in my home rig is more of a test exercise since many / most games no longer even support SLI - I'll probably split the pair and go to a single Xp in multiple boxes when I get off my ass and finish the HTPC whose parts have just been sitting around.
 
I stopped overclocking once it became clear it's not "free" anymore. And the percentage improvement you can overclock these days are pretty low.

Back when CPUs used less than 50w of power, you used to be able to get a 20-40% overclock just using the stock cooler, and you didn't have to worry about overloading VRMs because the CPU used almost no power.

But today you're talking between 150w (mainstream platform) and 250w (enthusiast platform) overclock load power , so you spend $25-50 extra on better VRMs and $25-75 extra on a better CPU cooler, and a few dollars more on a better case.

All that effort just to get yourself a10-20% overclock. It's taken the fun out of budget overclocking. When money is no object, I can think of many other things I'd rather spend it on (like upgrading your build from a core i5 ti Core i7).
 
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It would be cool to see undervolting take off.

The problem is it harder to prove other than taking a pic of a watt o meter. It would be neat to see, for example, how low of a power draw you can achieve while getting at least 1000 Cinebench points.
 
Overclocking is about tinkering for me, its something that is fun. However, I also run two games that are very sensitive to clock speed and more cores does nothing (it's limited to 3), overclocking has almost zero impact on max frames, but has a massive impact on minimal frames for these games. No other rig however gets OCed, everything else, like my media server run stock, as worry free stability are main factors and OCing would see minimal to no gains. If I didn't play games that were clock speed limited, I would still OC my gaming rig for fun, but after I saw what I could do with it, I would probably set everything back to stock if there were no gains to be seen.
 
I used to OC out of necessity to run the newer game titles (had an AMD 6300 OC'ed to 4.5GHz used with a GTX 970) but now use an i5-8400 with GTX 1080 FTW and it runs great, never get any pauses or freezes etc and zero need to OC. I think OC for PC hardware enthusiasts is like car enthusiasts tweaking their car for speed... they do it because it's there :cool:
 
Damn overclocking is growing on me again....I bumped up the multiplier on two more cores on my i9-7940X and something tells me that I am going to order that delid kit soon....I tried not to care though but 4.7GHz on moarrrrr cores is NICE~!

The great thing with those new platforms (vs my old) is that 95% of the time my system stays underclocked and quiet and only turbos when needed and this does not last long. I.e in Adobe Apps.

Even when gaming it is still super quiet.
 
Damn overclocking is growing on me again....I bumped up the multiplier on two more cores on my i9-7940X and something tells me that I am going to order that delid kit soon....I tried not to care though but 4.7GHz on moarrrrr cores is NICE~!

The great thing with those new platforms (vs my old) is that 95% of the time my system stays underclocked and quiet and only turbos when needed and this does not last long. I.e in Adobe Apps.

Even when gaming it is still super quiet.


Nice - do you have any cinebench screen shots? I would think 3500 points at 4.7 Ghz...
 
Well I get 3191 with 4 Cores @ 4.6GHz and 2 Cores @ 4.7Ghz - the rest are @ 4.2Ghz.

Unless I delid I can't push this any further and even now I use AVX offsets. My cooling is a custom loop with an external MO-RA3 with 9X ML140 Pros so that is not the limitation since water temps don't rise easily. I am sure I can tweak the system further but I won't be bothered until I delid.

Cinebench_JARG.png
 
I am with you on not overclocking. I keep getting the K series processors, but haven't kept any overclock in place in probably 7+ years. I have just not seen a worthwhile advantage since the old Pentium 2 to Pentium 4 days, when clock speed was king and you only really had one core to work with. Better thread handling, multi core setups, and fewer real bottlenecks thanks to faster storage, ram, and processor options, mean a few hundred MHz doesn't deliver the real world advantage it once did. As in, I am unlikely to see any big improvement loading game levels or launching Chrome and stuff like that.

Maybe if I did video editing or something else that's almost exclusively processor intensive. I miss doing the OC just because I can, but these days with a job and two kids, I am happy that my PC runs great and is constantly stable and ready to do what I need when I need it.
 
I am going to revisit this thread again bearing a different perspective that last time.

Overclocking is subjective to your needs to be honest.

For instance I own a couple computers. On my main gaming productivity rig currently a 7820x I over clock the piss out of it. However on my lesser computers I would rather run them at stock to save power and generate less heat and there is no need to overclock them for any reason whatsoever.

I am toying with the idea of getting a Threadripper 2 32 core but I probably wouldnt overclock that even if I could. I would rather have absolutely stability at the cost of a little slower output for rendering my projects. That and having a 500+ watt CPU when overclocked is a lot of cooling I would have to place on it. Not to mention the added electrical cost associated with a 10 or 15% bump in performance.

Maybe in my usage scenario I would customize my overclock to include 6 or 8 core usage to be much higher but full core usage to be stock clocks.
 
My second post of the thread...

Not only do I not overclock anymore, but I don't find the need to buy a new generation motherboard+CPU each year either. I have a Haswell and it's plenty fast enough.
 
Just got an 8600K this week. Last upgrade was Sandy Bridge. (2500K) I will be overclocking, but perhaps not to the extreme of the chip's capabilities.
I sure would like to get 5 years out of this rig. 2500K was a great processor. (still kicking too)

Kid
 
I used to care about overclocking, but after a certain point, you come to the realization that it just isn't worth it.

Not only is it adding several days to your build time, but in order to overclock, you have to spend more money on the cooling system. Money you could have used to just get a higher end part in the first place. If you are at the extreme end of the parts where you can't get better without massive price increases, the difference between your overclocked and non overclocked would have no real world benefit anyway...
 
I like to put my hardware together and it already be fast enough to do exactly as I need. I prefer stability.

I just now got into 75hz gaming (freesync) but, I don't play AAA games.
 
....................... Money you could have used to just get a higher end part in the first place. If you are at the extreme end of the parts where you can't get better without massive price increases, the difference between your overclocked and non overclocked would have no real world benefit anyway...

You could say this for my latest build where I spent a lot on cooling (almost $2000) vs getting an i9-7980X (got a 7940X) or a second 1080Ti but there is more than meets the eye.

First and foremost the cooling system is already paying off via being ultra silent and second it will last me through several builds. On the contrary I chose the 7940X vs the 7980X for better single core speeds overclocking and honestly I can live with 4 less cores. A second 1080Ti would make minimal sense and only if I had a 4K display but I don't (YET given the options).
 
You could say this for my latest build where I spent a lot on cooling (almost $2000) vs getting an i9-7980X (got a 7940X) or a second 1080Ti but there is more than meets the eye.

First and foremost the cooling system is already paying off via being ultra silent and second it will last me through several builds. On the contrary I chose the 7940X vs the 7980X for better single core speeds overclocking and honestly I can live with 4 less cores. A second 1080Ti would make minimal sense and only if I had a 4K display but I don't (YET given the options).

This is true, but you also have a multi day build/setup. Running your water cooling for a solid day before installing it to check for leaks. Then the overclocking to find your highest stable freq (and all the week or so troubleshooting to eliminate low binned memory/weaker motherboards holding you back). Then you have to run the torture test for a day or so to make sure it's actually stable at the freq you got it to. If not, then drop it down and run for another day, then another day... It's a pain in the ass.

And then in the end, realizing that going from 4.3ghz boosted to 4.6ghz ended up not making any difference in your real world system output and you only ended up with more system maintenance for the cooling systems.
 
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