Two programmers I know told me NOT to overclock...

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LearninToBuild

Limp Gawd
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Two programmers I know were adamant, and basically almost said it in a way that was ridiculing, that I should NOT overclock. Their reasons were chips come fast enough as is, and that I would not notice any performance increase from gaming as I already have a 3.0ghz chip, and it is not recommended.

They also referred to it as a hobby and said it wasn't worth the risk, even though I have a heatsink that would allow me to crank it up.

Now, I pretty much still intend to overclock at least to 3.5ghz on my E8400 chip, but it was surprising hearing two (what I consider) computer experts oppose OC'ing tha tmuch.

Are gamers in their own little bubble on this?
 
As an aspiring programmer I can say this: programmers are not computer experts.
 
opinions are like aholes everyone has one. not saying they are right or wrong its just that there opinion. not everyone who programs or builds or works with computers all day are over clockers.
 
Most of the programmers I've met over the years don't know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to hardware. Your mileage may vary.
 
Think of it this way... There are some car enthusiasts who love to see cars as pristine and working as if they just rolled off the assembly line, and other car enthusiasts who like to push cars way beyond stock performance. There are similar distinctions between different computer enthusiasts.

Granted, there is some risk to overclocking. You might simply induce some instability or at worst end up frying something. But it's up to you if you are willing to take that risk to squeeze out some extra performance from your system.
 
i cant say ive met many programmers but i feel some are better at software/programming then hardware and vice versa.
 
Dan_D said:
Most of the programmers I've met over the years don't know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to hardware. Your mileage may vary.
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Pretty much. I've found that it applies to basically anything outside of programming. Quite a few programmers I know are idiot savants when it comes to computers.
 
No doubt, the kid that bagged my groceries last weekend told me that synthetic motor oil is bad to use...........( see whut I did there??)

At any rate, these keyboard cowboys are no more ( probably less ) an expert than you are about hardware. They write code. Next time it happens bust em with the old adage "Pics or shens!!!!!"

Now, to be fair and not one sided. Would youre grandma notice those tightened Ram settings and that pushed up FSB while shes writing little Johnny a letter in Outlook express? Probably not. But lets face it, were here on [H]ard for a reason, were above average.
 
I have had my 3.5 year old AMD64 X2 3800 OC'ed the whole time I have owned it and it is faster than much of the "core" generation of chips that followed it.

Look, you can't argue with making the processor faster, the gains are tremendous, sometimes as much as 30% in real world performance.

My computer runs wPrime 32m stock in about 39 seconds., OC'ed it runs it in about 29.3 seconds. That is about a 26% increase in speed. 26% is often the difference between two generations, so if you think having a processor that will be faster than anything out while its current, and probably as fast as the next generation I don't see what their argument is.
 
Well they are programmers I mean it doesn't take a supercomputer to program. Overclocking is more important to gamers or people who want to squeeze more performance out of an encoding machine. Point is that they are right that it's not for everyone. If you think the extra performance is worthwhile for you, then it is worth it to overclock. Just make sure you know what you are doing.
 
jay2472000 said:
Now, to be fair and not one sided. Would youre grandma notice those tightened Ram settings and that pushed up FSB while shes writing little Johnny a letter in Outlook express? Probably not. But lets face it, were here on [H]ard for a reason, we're fucking awesome.
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Fixed.
 
mayaman said:
I have had my 3.5 year old AMD64 X2 3800 OC'ed the whole time I have owned it and it is faster than much of the "core" generation of chips that followed it.
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Are you claiming that your overclocked Athlon X2 3800+ is faster than a Core 2 Duo overclocked?
 
To be fair, they are right in a sense.
CPU frequency is only a part of the performance equation. Raising CPU freq with overclocking certainly helps, but you already paid for most of the performance in the architecture of the chip. If your cpu can't handle a game now, overclocking will give you a few more fps, but don't expect miracles.
 
Dan_D said:
Are you claiming that your overclocked Athlon X2 3800+ is faster than a Core 2 Duo overclocked?
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Is what I am claiming not immediately evident in what I have written?

For the benefit of your understanding, what I stated is that my overclocked x2 3800 will best a LOT of stock core 2's, maybe the entire duo range.

But in your defense, the duo can be massively overclocked. However, this discussion isn't about oc vs oc its about oc vs stock isn't it?

Just a little proof:
Core2
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=736059
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=775132
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=775811

AMD x2 3800
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=867161
 
mayaman said:
This is a definite troll topic.
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I understand anything that goes against the grain of what's considered common or unchallengeable is thought to be 'trolling', but I was just interested to hear if others outside of the gaming industry generally felt this way, as I said so far all non-gaming computer types that have knowledge of computers have told me to avoid overclocking.
 
LearninToBuild said:
I understand anything that goes against the grain of what's considered common or unchallengeable is thought to be 'trolling', but I was just interested to hear if others outside of the gaming industry generally felt this way, as I said so far all non-gaming computer types that have knowledge of computers have told me to avoid overclocking.
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Fair enough. I think its the "Two programmers I know" thing that kind of sounds like mischief.

Again I see their point, and for lots of people its probably not worth the trouble. It took me about two weeks to get my system rock stable on my particular board and to sort out some hardware issues and cooling issues. It takes effort and you can definitely fry your CPU or memory(which I have done), so for the casual computer user I would say overclocking is worthless. But it doesn't benefit just gamers, I find that OC'ing is a way to extend the life of an older system, and it benefits me personally when working with Illustrator and Photoshop... My camera takes 16MP images, it takes a fast system to handle that and OC'ing makes it noticeably more bearable.
 
I'm a programmer and I say overclock as high as you want as long as it's completely stable.

I see a lot of people pushing their systems to the brink of instability to get a miniscule percent or two more performance above a stable overclock. Then those people blame the OS or software when things start failing ("X doesn't like overclocking"). ;)
 
For me, overclocking isn't worth the risk. Stressing your CPU to go from 40fps to 45fps isn't worth it and hampers the resale value when i upgrade. Difference in benchmark scores is negligible. Heck, the reason i built rigs with higher specs than my friends is so that i DON'T HAVE to overclock.
 
Overclocking is nice hobby and it may increase performance but in the basic principle OC will not turn your older computer into new and generally faster machine. That's why not all advanced users have sense for overclocking. But If you wish to overclock why not? Just be sure you have good cooling...etc so you will don't frie your processor :D .
 
ALL I GOT TO SAY ON THE MATTER IS ...."THEY ARE pOOOSAYS". obviously they are not members of [H]
 
LearninToBuild said:
Two programmers I know were adamant, and basically almost said it in a way that was ridiculing, that I should NOT overclock. Their reasons were chips come fast enough as is, and that I would not notice any performance increase from gaming as I already have a 3.0ghz chip, and it is not recommended.

They also referred to it as a hobby and said it wasn't worth the risk, even though I have a heatsink that would allow me to crank it up.

Now, I pretty much still intend to overclock at least to 3.5ghz on my E8400 chip, but it was surprising hearing two (what I consider) computer experts oppose OC'ing tha tmuch.

Are gamers in their own little bubble on this?
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That's like saying that if I press on my accelerator more, my car won't go faster.

Now the new i7 chips are pretty damn fast... so if you can already play your games at a good framerate, then you may not need to overclock, but that's different from saying that you won't get any benefit from it at all.

Plus, people do other things than gaming with their PCs.
 
Shameless Liar said:
That's like saying that if I press on my accelerator more, my car won't go faster.
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Your car will go 100rpm over the engine rating on the verge of blowing itself for an extra 10mph on top of the stock 100mph. Go ahead and press the accelerator if you think it's worth it.
 
Complete rubbish. Consider the E8400. It hits 3.6 on air flawlessly, as if it were born to run at 3.6. I've had to remove the OC a time or two during troubleshooting. Big difference in speed between 3.0 and 3.6. If the OC is like 100MHz, the difference isn't so noticeable, but 600MHz definitely is.
 
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GJSNeptune said:
Complete rubbish. Consider the E8400. It hits 3.6 on air flawlessly, as if it were born to run at 3.6. I've had to remove the OC a time or two during troubleshooting. Big difference in speed between 3.0 and 3.6. If the OC is like 100MHz, the difference isn't so noticeable, but 600MHz is definitely is.
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Yeah, I have the Dark Knight installed, wish I found more comprehensive instructions to overclock on my motherboard, it does have the utility there but I'm really not eager to screw with something I could easily mess up.

Here's my mobo FWIW: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128388
 
mayaman said:
Is what I am claiming not immediately evident in what I have written?

For the benefit of your understanding, what I stated is that my overclocked x2 3800 will best a LOT of stock core 2's, maybe the entire duo range.

But in your defense, the duo can be massively overclocked. However, this discussion isn't about oc vs oc its about oc vs stock isn't it?

Just a little proof:
Core2
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=736059
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=775132
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=775811

AMD x2 3800
http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=867161
Click to expand...

Your overclocked Athlon X2 3800+ would probably out perform the slowest Core 2's at stock speeds. The reality of it is that clock for clock the Athlon X2 didn't match the Core 2 Duo. If your signature is correct you reached an overclock of 2.7GHz. Certainly not high enough to out perform the entire range of Core 2 Duo processors. The Athlon 64 X2 needs a significant clock speed advantage to out perform any Core 2 Duo. If you don't overclock an E6300 or an E6400 then sure, you'd be correct but for anything else in the line 2.7GHz doesn't get it done. From the E6600 (2.4GHz) on up you wouldn't have been able to do it. The E6700 ran at 2.66GHz and the Core 2 Extreme X6800 ran at 2.93GHz if I recall correctly. As I recall you need close to 400MHz of a clock speed advantage to match or exceed the performance of the Core 2 Duo. You needed even more on a Phenom (500MHz+) to out perform or even match a Core 2 Quad.

The FX-62 couldn't do it either.

http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTExMCwxLCwxNjA=

Here you can see that the Athlon X2 FX-62 couldn't even match the Core 2 Duo E6700 which ran at 2.66GHz compared to the Athlon X2 FX-62's 2.8GHz.

http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTEwOCwsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0

In straight gaming performance it is much closer with only a slight advantage going to the Core 2's in most of the tests.

http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTExMSwsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0

Stock for stock your Athlon X2 3800+ has lower power consumption. I'll give it that. It was also incredibly inexpensive at the time. I'm not saying it was a bad CPU, but let's be realistic, unless you have a pretty massive clock speed advantage, it didn't match or come close to out performing at least half the range of stock Core 2's. All that is a moot point anyway as the enthusiasts could get 1GHz+ overclocks out of there Core 2 Duo's. No this isn't about OC'ed Athlon X2's vs. stock Core 2's. Sure your post may have been about that but this thread is actually about not overclocking your PC because two programmers think they know what they are talking about and that being total bullshit.
 
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Personally I wouldn't overclock a work based machine for programming, cad or servers

but anything that isn't mission critical or isn't depended upon for income/productivity is fair game imo.
 
Brom42 You rock brother!!

Ok, I can see why they ( programmers) would not reccomend it. If you OC and arent STABLE and you have crashes, I can definately see people blaming "crappy code" for it, so I understand that. Also, as has been said, a 100 Mhz increase isnt gonna get you a lot, considering the current speed of processors. Honestly, once SSD are a little more stable, I think OC has kind of plateaued, maybe its just I dont run enough CPU intensive tasks :confused:. It used to be a black art, but now its gotten so easy that anyone with the cash to throw together a decent H2O cooling setup can do some pretty impressive OC.

My E8400 was at 3.6 on air, easy, and it was fun. I didnt notice any gains ( Once again, I probably wouldnt ) so I decided to go back to stock, but for you guys that do OC, more power to you guys, some of the best reads are OC stories, wether it be bad news or good news. Having said that, to the OP, if you havent done it, I say do it man!!!! Its always fun to at least have a basic understanding of whats happening, and even if you decide to go back to stock speeds, its cool to say "Yeah, I did that"
 
CanadaOwnsJoo said:
Personally I wouldn't overclock a work based machine for programming, cad or servers

but anything that isn't mission critical or isn't depended upon for income/productivity is fair game imo.
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I have similar thoughts on the matter.
 
CanadaOwnsJoo said:
Personally I wouldn't overclock a work based machine for programming, cad or servers

but anything that isn't mission critical or isn't depended upon for income/productivity is fair game imo.
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me three.

Whether you notice the performance difference or not is all on you. I couldn't stand my Opty 165 at its stock 1.8Ghz... but at 2.6Ghz it was perfectly fast enough for my needs. My Q6600 at stock 2.4Ghz runs fine, but if I'm encoding, I'll notice a huge difference when its OC'd to even 3.2Ghz.
 
Sly said:
Stressing your CPU to go from 40fps to 45fps isn't worth it.
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In your opinion. Going from 40 to 45 fps in a first person shooter like TF2 or L4D is totally noticeable to me.
 
pxc said:
I'm a programmer and I say overclock as high as you want as long as it's completely stable.

I see a lot of people pushing their systems to the brink of instability to get a miniscule percent or two more performance above a stable overclock. Then those people blame the OS or software when things start failing ("X doesn't like overclocking"). ;)
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This. If stability is required find the max OC you can test stable on, then clock it down by around 200-300mhz.
 
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