Is it me or is overclocking getting a lot more complex?

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It seems like these days (including video cards) that finding the settings necessary for an overclock is a lot more complicated. Even AMD's precision boost 2 has a special setting in BIOS you have to manually enable first before you get the best default performance. I built my Nephew a Ryzen 1600 system and when I first installed the OS everything worked great and I could overclock it from Windows to 3.7GHz no issue. The second time I installed the OS overclocking didn't work at all. I had to manually hunt it down in bios and engage it by hand. The software disabled the overclock no matter what I did (and yes it was the latest version of the bios and software)

Intel is just as bad though.

I don't mind fiddling with voltages and load line calibrations for voltage sags. But it seems like there are a lot more buttons and switches to flip these days. (That goes for video cards as well)
 
I think it's all the opposite, I find overclocking since the last couple of years, easier than ever.. everything used to require some knowledge of what to do, noawadays everything it's automatic basically.. even people with no overvoclocking knowledge can overclock modern machines due that fact..
 
Overclocking has gotten brain-dead simple. Mobo makers are cooking it in their firmware so even morons can overclock with the click of an overclock button. I still miss the days when overclocking via jumpers. pencils and soldering irons was reserved for those souls that weren't afraid to open up their cases and experiment. Progress... sigh!
 
Overclocking has gotten brain-dead simple. Mobo makers are cooking it in their firmware so even morons can overclock with the click of an overclock button. I still miss the days when overclocking via jumpers. pencils and soldering irons was reserved for those souls that weren't afraid to open up their cases and experiment. Progress... sigh!

add to that, overclocking in realtime via OS tools with automatic buttons, lol.. for the lazy guys who are afraid to go into BIOS settings.
 
Silicon designers are getting smarter about their power envelopes and energy management, and I suspect processing nodes are getting tighter in their manufacturing capability. That means less headroom for overclocking.

But it also means more guaranteed usable performance and less silicon lottery.

I'm all for it. Overclocking was simply exploiting the margin that the designer had to include for variations in operations design and the physical manufacturing process. Put the right sensors in there to monitor it, and you can dynamically adjust to be able to use that all the time. That's exactly what Boost, PowerTune, Turbo, etc do.
 
.... All you have to do these days is up the multiplier and the core voltage....
 
and many many gaming motherboards now have a one click oc feature............. built right into the system bios ..its gotten too easy ..but i like it on my ASUS STRIX Z 270 H board with my i 5 7600 K
 
It seems like these days (including video cards) that finding the settings necessary for an overclock is a lot more complicated. Even AMD's precision boost 2 has a special setting in BIOS you have to manually enable first before you get the best default performance. I built my Nephew a Ryzen 1600 system and when I first installed the OS everything worked great and I could overclock it from Windows to 3.7GHz no issue. The second time I installed the OS overclocking didn't work at all. I had to manually hunt it down in bios and engage it by hand. The software disabled the overclock no matter what I did (and yes it was the latest version of the bios and software)

Intel is just as bad though.

I don't mind fiddling with voltages and load line calibrations for voltage sags. But it seems like there are a lot more buttons and switches to flip these days. (That goes for video cards as well)

First off, Precision Boost 2 is how AMD's Ryzen 2xxx series and Threadripper 2xxx series processors behave by default. What you are talking about is Precision Boost Overdrive. That requires enabling the feature from the UEFI BIOS. However, this isn't the case on all motherboards either. Overclocking through software (within Windows), is a mixed bag depending on the software. I would only do that with Ryzen Master or Intel's XTU. Overclocking in the BIOS couldn't be easier on either platform. You set your RAM speed, set your CPU voltage, and then set the multiplier. In some extreme cases you need to set the SOC voltage (AMD) or enable load-line calibration (AMD & Intel) in the UEFI BIOS.

Overclocking is easier than its ever been. With Precision Boost 2 and Precision Overdrive, manual overclocking on the AMD platform is largely pointless.
 
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yep and check temps (y)

Yeah man.... unlike the X3470 I've got coming in....

I'll have to adjust the BCLK (which affects the RAM speed) and set a stable cpu multiplier, so I have to change the RAM multi and timings....

Then there's the core voltage and QPI voltage (plus lowering the QPI from 18x to 16x, disabling speed spectrum and enabling LLC)

I'm gonna shoot for 173x22=3.8Ghz at 1.25v and 1.21qpi.... Using 1600 RAM clocked to 173x8 = 1384

I COULD overclock the ram and shoot for 4.0, but honestly I'm not THAT experienced of an overclocker. (and my P55A-UD3 doesn't have the best VRMs in the world lol)

- If anyone remembers 1156 Xeon overclocking settings from way back when, please lemme know if these numbers sound "solid".. Thanks
 
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Haha, I don't even know where to start here. It's definitely progressed to a point where currently it is easier than ever before to overclock your system granted you are on somewhat recent hardware.

Hell, I remember back in the day when we were soldering potentiometers onto graphics cards and motherboards and doing pencil mods. Now you can just go buy a system, get a decent AIO (also not really a thing back then aside from an external unit like an exos) and use and the easy button the motherboard comes with. Most mobos even ship with presets you can use depending on if you have a watercooled or air cooled system and you want to oc.
 
Easier then ever.

My first overclock - change the fsb jumper on a 486 system from 25 to 33. I was instantly hooked. It wasn't even my system.

Then it got more complicated with tweaking stuff. Ram timings, CPU multipliers, FSB, PCI and ISA clocks tied to the FSB.

Then came AGP, which was tied to the FSB until it wasn't.

Pencil mods, voltage mods, etc.

Then came Socket 939, with which you had to deal with even more subsystem speeds, such as HT clock tight tot he FSB, multitudes of dividers. Not all motherboard showed the speed and you had to manually calculate the multipliers and dividers to see what you would be running them at.

You also ended up having multiple layers of RAM sub-timings to mess with.

And you also had FSB holes where stuff wouldn't work at all once you got up to a certain range.. but if you went past that range, stuff would suddenly work again. Yay for auto-chipset divider/timing settings that were poorly configured to say the least.

It stayed pretty complicated until LGA1366 and then started getting somewhat easier.

Now it is dumbed down so much that anybody can just press a button to have their system use some auto-overclock settings.

Sure you can still tweak, but it takes about 1/100th the time it used to to figure out good stable settings.
 
The only thing that has gotten harder is GPUs. When you OC a CPU you set your speed and voltage and you get that no matter what, unless you hit shutdown temp. With a GPU you overclock but the clock speed and voltage will change depending on power usage and temps. BIOS mods can fix that but it is an extra step and takes a bit of reading to mod your own BIOS. Maybe it is different for AMD cards, I haven't overclocked one since a 7950.
 
Ummm.. So I could set my CPU multiplier to 99 and my voltage to whatever and as long as I keep it cool enough, I will be able to run my CPU at 9.9Ghz? Ummm.. NO.

As for GPU overclocking.. dead simple. Took me about 15 minutes to get a good idea of what the max clocks for my 1080 are. May try to tweak a little bit more IF I ever run into anything it won't run well at 1200p before I get a new card.

AMD GPUs are just as easy.
 
I think the same thing. There are dozens of separate voltage controls and settings related to overclocking. Back in the good days you had two controls : FSB / Vcore. It was much easier to OC.
Now you can waste hours trying to find which voltage affects stability and which doesn't. Not to mention that some wise-ass Mobos decide to auto-adjust voltage for you, and go to ridicilous voltages without you doing anything.
Couple this with on-the fly power saving features that should adjust core voltage depending on cpu load, it's all a big mess.

And the automated overclocking built-in into bioses are useless. They use non-optimal settings, and they were unstable every freaking time I've tried them. And even if they work, they don't get anywhere near full potential of the CPU.
 
Ummm.. So I could set my CPU multiplier to 99 and my voltage to whatever and as long as I keep it cool enough, I will be able to run my CPU at 9.9Ghz? Ummm.. NO.

As for GPU overclocking.. dead simple. Took me about 15 minutes to get a good idea of what the max clocks for my 1080 are. May try to tweak a little bit more IF I ever run into anything it won't run well at 1200p before I get a new card.

AMD GPUs are just as easy.

There is this thing called stability. It's not just multis, voltage, and cooling. You could set it to that and watch it fail to boot, although I think the multi is limited to something in the 60s. The limits to multi and voltage are beyond what you can get stable, so you can push it and find the max. With a GPU there are power, voltage, and temp limits that are set low. You are just OCing until you hit one of those limits and saying it is your max. That is why there are threads with 100s of pages about no limits BIOS mods for GPUs.

Imagine if you bought a new 8700k and went to OC but were limited to 1.3v, oh and then once the CPU hits 70C or your power usage goes over a certain point that limit drops to 1.25v and reduces your clock speed at the same time.
 
It's physically easier, since it's all done in software now, and it's somewhat easier since you don't have to mess with the "FSB". But with all the offsets and voltage options on the seperate parts of the package, it can be more complex to find the "max" stable OC, with using the lowest voltages.
 
Not really, when you enter the BIOS and see presets for 5Ghz and on.... Also a good amount of boards can recover after 2-3 failed boots, unlike the old days of clearing CMOS via jumper/battery removal and going back to your notepad to see what the last successful settings were.
 
There seems like there are more variables now, but with the auto OC features, you don't need to know anything about what they do.

I mean in the old Core 2 days, you pretty much just changed the bus speed in bios to 333 instead of 266 (and adjusted memory speed accordingly) and your Q6600 went up 600mhz. Kind of hard to screw that up even if you didn't really know what you were doing.
 
Fiddled and fiddled with my 3930K, all six cores stable @ 4,4GHz. Stress test and it throttles to 3.7GHz. I can reset the bios settings and select overclock, set the multiplier and get 90% of the same result. The only difference is my overclock vs canned is slightly better because of less heat due to the voltage tuning.

How is that not easier? Oh wait, forgot my Pencil. ; D
 
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Just you, buddy. We have more features built into boards. My old, by today, sabertooth 990FX has a ton of tweaking features that were never around, like memory drive strengths. But you just set a few things in the bios and it can deal with voltages and memory timmings, etc on it's own. Crazy easy even compared to when I got into Overclocking in the single core socket 939 days.
 
Ummm.. So I could set my CPU multiplier to 99 and my voltage to whatever and as long as I keep it cool enough, I will be able to run my CPU at 9.9Ghz? Ummm.. NO.

As for GPU overclocking.. dead simple. Took me about 15 minutes to get a good idea of what the max clocks for my 1080 are. May try to tweak a little bit more IF I ever run into anything it won't run well at 1200p before I get a new card.

AMD GPUs are just as easy.

This.
GPU's are simple to OC. The thing I hate is OC'ing your new GPU and playing through all your old Steam games, to find out that new AAA title you just bought a month later, CTD after 5min.

And you get that little nagging voice in the back of your mind saying; "But it can't be my OC, it's stable....isn't it?!? Nah, it's gotta be the game cuz it's new and buggy, isn't it?!? " :cautious:
 
Overclocking is only more difficult if you want to micro-tune ti manually. For the rest of the world there are all those 1-click wonder Windows overclocking utilities (sorry Linux guys - most of you get left out in the cold...) just about every motherboard maker packages with their boards.
 
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