Popularity of overclocking

I didn’t read every post in this thread but I was just talking about this recently. I think part of it is that overclocking isn’t what it used to be: but a decent motherboard and almost any chip, adjust multiplier and voltage. There’s a lot more to it now with more cores, boost clocks, K-series chips, process technology, etc.
 
travm said:
Fewer bsods at stock. Overclocking used to be about getting more for less. Now it's more like adding a fart can to your civic to get another 5hp.
The last time I felt the need to overclock was on the amd FX platform.
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Hey now, I have a civic. My mods are fart can (500hp) cold air intake ( 350hp) and a huge rear wing adding 1000hp. I blow by HellCats all day long.
 
MajorYikes said:
I didn’t read every post in this thread but I was just talking about this recently. I think part of it is that overclocking isn’t what it used to be: but a decent motherboard and almost any chip, adjust multiplier and voltage. There’s a lot more to it now with more cores, boost clocks, K-series chips, process technology, etc.
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lol isnt what it used to, flipping dip switches, moving jumpers, pencil trick etc...
 
It's easier than it has ever been...but it also doesn't really matter as much. An extra 2-5% in games doesn't really matter in most instances. It's not like you see it in typical desktop performance either. It's usually in very specific productivity apps or the rare game that relies on the CPU. It's great for those, but they're kinda few and far between. Tough to argue with free performance, though.
 
What I'm really confused/disappointed with OCing new CPUs. Is when we had all these new processor releases that we could OC from 2GHz to 3GHz. Next year would be 3 to 4GHz.

Back then (2008) I thought in 2019 we'll have 9GHz OC's. But instead we got more cores and less overclocking. Given the choice, I'd rather have a 2 core that OC's to 9GHz.

Its very strange how processor technology became what it is today. It has dramatically slowed compared to the good ole tech boom days.
 
Motley said:
What I'm really confused/disappointed with OCing new CPUs. Is when we had all these new processor releases that we could OC from 2GHz to 3GHz. Next year would be 3 to 4GHz.

Back then (2008) I thought in 2019 we'll have 9GHz OC's. But instead we got more cores and less overclocking. Given the choice, I'd rather have a 2 core that OC's to 9GHz.

Its very strange how processor technology became what it is today. It has dramatically slowed compared to the good ole tech boom days.
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The biggest issue is that 9ghz just isnt happening. Its more cores, or 5ghz. Turns out many workloads do scale with cores. Games even up to 8 in some cases (maybe more in some games i dont know about). Its only been since 28nm iirc that we've been at a clockwall. I expect they'll figure something out to get that up. Maybe 5nm? Maybe 14nm++++++++++-X/@++.
 
It took a lot more than a year to go from 2-3ghz and even longer to get from 3-4. Overclocking now a days is lame. And has been since Sandy Bridge. Before overclockers were dirty, bottom of the web feeders, now its mainstream and everyone and their grandma wants to do it.

That's why its so easy now, so the masses can do it too. To lazy to oc? No problem. Got a 5ghz cpu for you right out of the box, can maybe get 200mhz extra out of it, if you spend half a grand on a nice loop.. but hey look at those numbers.
 
On the one hand there are OC extremists that always seem to get one of those CPUs that hit min. 5Ghz below 1.30v, and then noobs like me that can't get a 8700k stable at 4.9, because one did not consider AVX offsets. Just today it came to bear on me that the thermal headroom is getting less and less for OC without AVX offset unless one is delidding (and voiding the warranty) of that thing.

For instance, i have a 7700k that hits the 90°C limit with 4.7 Ghz at 1.246/1.264v doing AVX work. At 5.0Ghz i need at least 1.316 vcore for non-AVX load but here my temps reach easily 90°C on a NH-D15 cooler. Solution? Find a vcore inbetween 1.290 and 1.246 so that AVX multiplier -2 and else 4.9Ghz give me acceptable temps. No guide helped me for this task, as it involves giving AVX load an vcore undervolt to achieve OK thermals.
For my 8700k, i got in this temp zone only with at least 1.380 vcore, and it needed this for 4.9 Ghz non-AVX load, so a bad chip sadly, even in stock it needed vcores way higher than what I have seen in forums and due to the heat I filed a warranty claim.

My old 2600k is able to maintain 4.7Ghz below 1.350v with temps below 77, even with AVX load. 4.8 Ghz will always fail on the other hand (watchdog timeout).

My take would be that overclocking might have gotten easier with mainboards promoting OC-friendliness, but getting each specific cpu in a comfort zone has been an absolute nightmare in my case as either the thermals were being maxed out on safe vcore ranges or an OC would not pan out without finding AVX offsets to match and then vcores to match both load types.
Just today I found out that there is a AVX bug to the C-states, and while playing TW Warhammer 2, I could compare the frequency switching occurences: C-states ON, upended the chart so that AVX offset would kick in over 70% of duty time. When off it was less than 30%. So I might get also a Bios fix then for microcode to see if the game actually uses AVX at all, even 30% seems to much.
In my opinion OCing has gotten much harder to achieve and most often I would encounter CPUs on the verge of allowing any multiplier unlock or even defects on stock. Not a great experience to discover such things. The sad thing is that the more cores a CPU has, the higher the chances not all will work at the same frequency with equal vcore. Having fun adjusting each core with seperate vcore, i think this feature already exists with the newest mainboards. It's gotten all messier in my opinion.
 
Last 3 platforms I’ve been more interested in what voltage ranges are acceptable as a check on what my bios is inclined to do.
This is x270, x299, b450.

They want to oc for you, I probably won’t agree with the vendors definition of safe or daily use.

Just look at x570 right now, not rocket science to learn what’s safe for ryzen and notice some boards drift far from spec.
 
I first got into computing and overclocking in highschool, circa 2006/2007. I built a computer P5k mobo, Q6600, 8800GT, 4gb ram and it blew almost anything out of the water. My limits were when Crysis first came out. Even at the Q6600 oc'ed to 3.4, the performance of the game struggled on the lowest settings.

Overclocking brought my build back to life and was able to run windows 7 before I eventually went to a laptop and let go of the system. It seems as though 10 years go overclocking was the "new thing", you could out-perform the more expensive chips and gpus with what you could buy and extending the longevity of the build. Now overclocking is the first thing everyone does. Water cooling seems like the norm now.

My last post was in 2012 and finally am back. Starting a new build, this time piece-mealing it.
 
somebrains said:
Last 3 platforms I’ve been more interested in what voltage ranges are acceptable as a check on what my bios is inclined to do.
This is x270, x299, b450.

They want to oc for you, I probably won’t agree with the vendors definition of safe or daily use.

Just look at x570 right now, not rocket science to learn what’s safe for ryzen and notice some boards drift far from spec.
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I agree. Loadline calibration is even scarier for most motherboards. The amount of negative vdroop that I've seen with a dmm in the Lynnfield days was nuts.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
I agree. Loadline calibration is even scarier for most motherboards. The amount of negative vdroop that I've seen with a dmm in the Lynnfield days was nuts.
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I just replied to someone asking about my old 2600.

Someone else hit me up back when I was selling my 7820x.

All oc capability ?s.

Conditionally I could hit edge case clocks, I had to be very specific about my workloads. Synthetic testing was fine for stability, but actual workload testing let me cheat more performance 24/7.

You learn a whole bunch about a particular bios revision and specific build you have. Otherwise I'd just buy a 9900k for gaming/Intel slanted productivity and a 3900x for everything else.

But then I'd be oblivious to how my build worked for my use case bc I'm throwing whatever is currently at the top of benchmark charts.

I like clocking cheaper parts as an exercise.

My daily driver is an air cooled 8400 desktop running Ubuntu and 2 monitors. That's the box I pay my bills cranking python, react, and AWS acct management. It's super boring, might as well be treated like an Enterprise supported vendor shrinkwrapped workstation.

Whenever the MW BR drops, I'll build another box to see what I need to play, record, stream. Whatever low $ parts I deem minimum spec for my use case will get flogged.

I'll learn a bunch about what the box can do and when I need help from add-on hardware encoders.
 
Unfortunately most products are all binned and sorted now, whilst simultaneously being pushed to their safe limits already, so overclocking, which was once the wild west, has been for the most part gobbled up in the ever increasing squeeze of that corporate bottom line. I miss the glory days of the 2.4c and trying to keep Prescott (press-hot) cool while going for 4ghz. Giant heat pipe monsters with ear bleeding 256cfm fans on top made my room a permanent heaphone zone, otherwise a permanently cranked system to cover the sound. Such good memories of such pain in the ass ways to get more performance. Plus you could take a 100 dollar chip and overclock it to a 1000 dollar chip back then.

check out this bad boy, you could make a cd hover above it indefinitely with the air flow.
https://www.performance-pcs.com/fan...cfm-super-high-speed-case-fan-pfb1212uhe.html
 
Is RAM also binned? Since I’ve had non overclockable motherboards for many years, RAM is the only thing I’ve been able to overclock (and I’ve been able to hit above spec for the last few systems).
 
I don't think I've done much with Ryzen pretty much since they released the first gen. While I appreciate the higher clocks, I pay more attention to the heat and power usage. With the last few Intel setups I had, the only thing I did was adjust the MCE to all core turbo a little higher. Other than that, I left it alone.

Definitely not like the days when I took a 1.6Ghz Celeron E1200 to 3.2Ghz on air...

If anything, I play around more with video card overclocking and undervolting and adjusting RAM timings to get them a little tighter.
 
I personally think overclocking is not dead, but what we remember is dead. The Celeron days are long over and that kind of wild west tinkering is gone too. My best ones was a Celeron 333 to 450 (mainboard limited), voodoo 3 2000 (143 - 183) and then an opteron 165 which went from 1.8 to 2.8.

There's a few reasons. All have been mentioned.
- Fewer people are using desktops regularly.
- it's all automatic now so a lot of the old knowledge is being lost or at least not so commonly known as it once was.
- for many, it's just not necessary anymore. Even low end processors are good enough for most tasks now.

To the last point, I'm one of those. There's so few new games I'm interested in these days that I don't need to overclock. For myself, I used to do it because I was a poor student and it extended the life of my hardware. When I built my current system, I got a i5 6600k Skylake, gtx 970, and some other shit that doesn't really matter right now. I had full intentions of overclocking it. I never have because I just don't need to.

So combination of reasons.
 
Overclocking isn't dead, imo it's been getting more popular, but unfortunately, there's a lot of one-click OC solutions out there now. I got into OC with Pentium 4 Northwood on 478 :)
 
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