Overclocking. Is it worth it?

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murkris118

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 5, 2012
Messages
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Hi, So the title says it all... Is overclocking beneficial at all in tasks like gaming and video editing or is it just a wasted exercise?. If so how much extra performance can you get from overclocking. Have you overclocked you system JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN or have you really seen any benefit from overclocking your CPU to justify doing it?. Please provide comparisons between your cpu oc`d and non oc`d if you think overclocking does give you extra performance.
 
My experience with OCing has been hit and miss. A few years ago when I was using a Core2Duo 3GHz, I OCed a few hundred MHz and saw zero difference in my gaming.

In my current system I have a 2500k. I bumped it up to 4.4GHz, which is a 700MHz boost. I saw 15-20FPS gain in the game I was playing at the time, which was Skyrim. Of course Skyrim is a CPU bound game without texture mods (I also changed my GTX 460 to a GTX 570 and had almost zero change in Skyrim).

Now, I would never sacrafice stability or my chip to OC. The only reason I'm OCing my 2500k is because you can use offset voltage to give the chip a slight bump, without losing your power saving features (ability to clock down, use less voltage at idle, etc.). If I couldn't do that I would not set the chip staticly to 4.4GHz 24/7/365 because they are designed to be clocked down so I figure they are more durable that way.

If I saw no benefit from OCing I would not do it. I don't measure benefit by higher speed, either, because that doesn't always translate to better performance.
 
Depends...
I7 920 at 2.66ghz is not going to be great compared to a modest overclock to 3.5
However you probably wouldn't see much difference between an i7 3770k @4.2 compared to 5.0
That is also depending on the application and how cpu bound you are.
Arma 2 and Crysis 3 seem to see great improvement yet bioshock probably couldn't care less what my cpu is running at.

Gpu overclocks seem to more consistantly give an improvement though at times it can be quite small.

I might see if I can drum up some numbers rather than hearsay.
 
I do it because I can and it doesn't cost much more. Overclocking ensures I have top-notch performance and undoutedly the best bang/buck.

Have I noticed real-world differences? With some of my overclocks, yes, particularly when I do encoding.

Most of the time however, my cpu utilization is below 15%, so arguably I don't need to overclock. But every increase in FPS helps.
 
For video editing sure, as that is more CPU dependent. For games I find that the GPU speed is far more important than CPU.

But considering it's essentially a free upgrade if you have a good cooler etc. then why not just do it, find a setting where performance, heat, noise and power use are in a good balance.
 
murkris118 said:
Is overclocking beneficial at all in tasks like gaming and video editing or is it just a wasted exercise?
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I believe it depends on whether you are gaming, or video editing. These are very different types of applications:

With video editing, your only "opponent" is the clock. You have comparatively little reward from more speed, except maybe an additional coffee break. And you'd need a very significant objective speed increase to subjectively notice any improvement at all, to feel "Whoa, that's faster than before." I seem to recall figures of around 30% in this context. So, overclocking may or may not make sense here, but chances are it won't.

With some games, say: first person shooters, your opponent is another player, and you need to be faster than him or her. If you are faster, you win, and it's entirely sufficient if it's only a fraction of a second. Therefore, overclocking may have a much larger effect with gaming than elsewhere.

Interestingly in this context, there's a dead serious real-life game called "High Frequency Trading" that follows the same principle: Be faster than your opponent, and the winner takes all. Supermicro offers servers for such gamers, which allow overclocking to the tune of 6%. That wouldn't really make sense with video editing, but with High Frequency Trading, it does pay off. As long as you don't have moral objections to playing this game, and your friends don't have either.
 
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Personally i think thar OC for gaming just show any improvement only if the processor can not handle the game correctly or if are a semi-low clock cored processor.. Processors that have major improvement are thos core 2 quad.. A Q2C@2.4 bumped to 3.0ghz will have a much better improvement with that extra 600 mhz... I have same result that guy above with an E8400 y clocked it from 3.0 to 3.8 and the improvement was nearly 0.. Maybe 1 - 2 fps.. Now talking for example of benchmark every mhz count..and the results can be very very improved by oc...
 
A beefy overclock helps a lot when playing horribly unoptimized games like Natural Selection 2.
 
Why leave the extra performance on the table? I haven't deteriorated a CPU since the dual core socket 939 CPUs came out and I remember knowing the voltage was way too high. Still lasted me over a year and is still running to this day underclocked in my sisters computer.
There are plenty review sites that include CPU comparisons for new game reviews. See for yourself: http://www.techspot.com/review/642-crysis-3-performance/page6.html
 
I overclock because I can and because I see a difference. I don't like my vid cards being bottlenecked by the cpu.
 
Overclockers are doing overclocking because they are happy they accomplished something by theirs efforts.
 
ochadd said:
Why leave the extra performance on the table? I haven't deteriorated a CPU since the dual core socket 939 CPUs came out and I remember knowing the voltage was way too high. Still lasted me over a year and is still running to this day underclocked in my sisters computer.
There are plenty review sites that include CPU comparisons for new game reviews. See for yourself: http://www.techspot.com/review/642-crysis-3-performance/page6.html
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Nice to techspot still does this. It is actually very time-intensive to do CPU scaling on this scale. Safe to say there's no way I'd settle for stock performance, not when I have the tools and know-how to get better performance.

I didn't settle when I picked up my first TBred-B, and I don't settle now :p
*Ok - I did settle. I can't fully stabilize my terrible 750 at 4Ghz even, not without going way over 1.4Vcore :/
Some things you do have to settle on lmao.

Anyway, bottom-line to the OP: you bought a K-series SB. It needs to stretch its legs.
 
Overclock is really not worth it unless you have a reason to extract major free performance. If you have one of the latest processors on the market and latest GPU's you are not going to honestly justify the extra power bill and/pr wear and tear on your components in doing so.

But .... you are on [H]forums so if you do not overclock you might as well go over to the land of pixie dust sprinkling fairy puppies and double rainbow candy kitties.
 
CPU A = $100
CPU B = $200
CPU A + $30 cooler = more than CPU B performance ........ WIN!
 
Damn right it's beneficial, it's free performance at no hardware cost (if done smartly).
You can oc most modern CPU's on stock juice and still get several hundred MHz beyond what Turbo boost does on it's own; depending on the chip, you can go even higher on that same stock juice, sometimes even higher with a minor voltage bump.

You have 2 chip killers - too much voltage and too much heat. As long as you keep that in mind and don't overdo it on one or the other, you can overclock and keep the same components for the same amount of time as someone who doesn't overclock.

As to whether it helps games or video encoding? Games it's not going to help 99% of games, because most games are GPU dependent, not CPU dependent. Most games are happy with 2 cores ≥3 GHz.

Encoding depends on whether your encoding is done using the CPU or if it's using CUDA (GPU). Most people encode on the GPU using CUDA because it's typically faster than any CPU can do. But if you're encoding on the CPU, the higher the clock speed of the CPU, the faster that the encoding process will be finished.
 
I OC'd my Q6600 the day I built the machine it resides in 4.5 years ago. Nowadays, a 2.4ghz C2Q wouldn't be so great.

A 3.4ghz one, though? Still holdin' strong.

Yea, OCing was definitely beneficial.
 
I can probably run my i7 stock and I wouldn't really notice much of a difference from the mild OC i have now (4.2GHz) that said, I do encodes from time to time which is very CPU intensive and I'd certainly notice some time loss there, but probably not a whole lot since I don't usually wait around for my encodes to finish. But 4.2 was a very easy OC to achieve so I'm sticking with it, and while it may not be greatly beneficial today, that could and probably will change down the road. My Q6600 for example was at 3.2GHz (from 2.4) and it was a huge difference. If I had been forced to run it at stock speeds, I'd have upgraded it long before I actually did.
 
I am what you would call Pro who Overclocks (I am technically paid to OC the random machine, but I would not call myself a 'pro oc'er': I also use my machine at home for digital art and graphics. A random BSOD could mean hours of unsaved work down the drain. Even a mildly unstable machine could currupt an important file when saving.

However, with stability tests and 24hr system torture runs, I can at least bet that my machine runs stably, and have a huge boost to performance over stock settings. If done correctly, OCing can actually save time by reducing render times and increasing responsiveness.
 
I would saying learning about over clocking would be beneficial. When I first started, I was using auto oc which really doesn't set the proper voltages, causing additional heat. Anyway I was able to reduce the voltage at load to 1.31 from, if i remember correctly, around 1.38 was the original auto oc setting. As for actual benefits in performance I am unsure because I haven't really used it at stock settings.

Edit: It does take some time doing stability tests as previously mentioned to save yourself a headache if it does turn out to be slightly unstable.
 
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I think it depends on what you're overclocking and how far. For example, almost everyone here who owns a 2500K will go to 4.5 easily using something cheap like the Hyper 212 cooler and never adjust the values again. Some people will invest tons of $$$ on custom water-cooling setups on the same processor for an extra 0.3~0.5 gHz bump and a few degrees cooler on idle. The latter to me is just a waste of time and resources practically speaking. You can't complain that it wouldn't be fun to build though!
 
dhappy said:
I think it depends on what you're overclocking and how far. For example, almost everyone here who owns a 2500K will go to 4.5 easily using something cheap like the Hyper 212 cooler and never adjust the values again. Some people will invest tons of $$$ on custom water-cooling setups on the same processor for an extra 0.3~0.5 gHz bump and a few degrees cooler on idle. The latter to me is just a waste of time and resources practically speaking. You can't complain that it wouldn't be fun to build though!
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It's just that air coolers have caught up with water cooling. When I started water cooling, it was for better overclocking but even more so almost silent computer. The air coolers at the time were awful turbine sounding things.

Just few days ago I dumped my rather unwieldy (remember, this setup is many many years old and has only had the CPU and GPU blocks changed once) water cooling for air cooling and I'm pleasantly surprised that the noise levels are only slightly higher on load.
 
On many machine and cards, the power use and heat goes up faster than the clockspeed.

ie - If you take a $100 chip and bring it up the $200 chip speed, it using far more power and making far more heat.

IIRC, on a Dual Xeon, it was running at "4" work slices per hour and using 450w. When I clocked it to "5" workslices per hour, it was 650w. So 25% gain in clock, used ~40% more power.
 
jojo69 said:
Excuse me OP, I'll be needing your [H] card
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+1

But seriously, I overclock bc I'm not going to back for the next step up in CPU when an OC can solve that. The steps are not as predefined like they used to be, but example.. Q6600 vs Q6700. The 66 was like ~230 and the 67 was over $500.. I wasn't paying double when I could OC and get the same results. Simple economics.. money in my wallet!!
 
I don't overclock. I have enough systems/troubleshooting to do without an additional variable to throw into the mix.
 
even at 4.4, my 2500k cant maintain 60 fps in some games. of course that is poor optimization in those rare games but it is what it is so overclocking is a must to get the best out of every game.
 
My friend is funny, I put the 212 Plus on his i5-2500K, but he won't overclock and doesn't need to. It's cold...
 
im runing 3770K@ 5GHz HT + Gskill TridentX mem at 2800mhz and its killer

so YES OC is amazing

Cheers !!!
Sergio
 
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