Why bother overclocking?

[wadec22]

extra 200mhz? Got an extra 800mhz outta mine.

 

[Bona Fide]

Hooray for 5 pages of flamebait!

Or is there a point to this thread?

 

[Ice Czar]

Hooray for 5 pages of flamebait!
Or is there a point to this thread?

while it was a trollish question to ask in an overclocking forum
you obviously havent read all the answers or you might have learned something

it is a viable question whether or not it was originally intended as one

 

[Zxcs]

The _only_ reason I OC is to "get up there". I never OC purely for the performance gain. Yes thats right, I may bench on FX-57 at 3.8 and 6800Us at 500/1300, however I never actually play my games with those insane framerates. The only exception to this is my 4800+ X2 which runs at 3ghz 24/7, but thats because I cant be bothered to stick a beefy HS on to transfer all the heat; I'm lazy

 

[DFI Daishi]

It's not like you'll see huge insane performance benefits from the extra 200 mhz you'll get from overclocking.

If you're buying in the top 75%, overclocking won't give you a huge boost in performance to begin with, and by the end of your processor's life cycle, it won't put you up to 'modern' standards anyway. So what the fuck is the point?

If you want to waste your time tweaking FSB/RAM latency settings and worrying about instability, go for it.

I attempted overclocking my opteron, I set it back to default settings because of instability. My hl2 server started hard crashing....more than once. Resetting settings to default fixed the problems. meh... Just my thoughts

simply put: it's a hobby.

it happens to go hand in hand with the hobby of gaming, but both pursuits are no more and no less than hobbies.

sometimes, you get a lot more than 200 MHz speed increase........i guess that the biggest bonus for me is when i get to up the settings that i find playable to a higher level of quality as a result of getting improved performance from tweaking and overclocking my system.

it's not really a question of how much added performance it gets you: it's something that you can do if you enjoy doing it.

 

[Qwertyman]

why do we have to make our case anyway? I find this a trivial thread.

 

[sprocket]

There is also the sheer intellectual joy of trying to understand the complex interrelationships of memory timings/voltages/clockspeeds/etc. and achieving the balance necessary to wring more performance out of the platform.
It's like a puzzle and I enjoy puzzles of many kinds.

 

[Ice Czar]

maybe for the participants
but the audience is much much larger
and many have exactly this question in mind

the reasons we all overclock are substanially different
and its a useful thread (when on topic) to provide a spectrum of reasons and reasoning

 

[oqvist]

Yes it would equal 30 fps instead of 20 fps perhaps .

I think you need to try and find new arguments why more performance isn´t better

 

[kumquat]

I increased my CPU speed by 20%. TWENTY. This effectively turned my $322 X2 3800+ into a $610 X2 4600+.

I further increased my GPU speed by 20% as well.

All on stock coolers, so no additional investment was necessary.

Net effect was increasing my overall system speed by a solid 20% by changing a few BIOS settings.

That's worth doing.

PS It's 100% solid as a rock stable no matter what I throw at it. Just because your little OC experiment failed because of instability doesn't mean that the rest of us don't know how to overcome that.

 

[SSlaytanic]

overclocking 200MHz >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> paying $400 more

that about sums it up

 

[RegisteredToPost]

wow i feel stupid for posting this. I'm sorry guys. Actually i managed to get 2.61 stable at 1.45v. I'm satisfied. However, windows bootup is quicker at stock speeds. I think benchmarks are better this way however. hl2 server is no longer crashing, and all is stable. Primed for about 4 hours called it good.

 

[SSlaytanic]

new years hangover flamebait?!

 

[rayman2k2]

Bragging rights.

 

[Ice Czar]

wow i feel stupid for posting this. I'm sorry guys.

no reason to apologize,
though the tone of the question considering the forum it was posted in drew a few heated answers

new years hangover flamebait?!

of the ever dreaded caffine deprivation

 

[J32P2006]

wow i feel stupid for posting this. I'm sorry guys. Actually i managed to get 2.61 stable at 1.45v. I'm satisfied. However, windows bootup is quicker at stock speeds. I think benchmarks are better this way however. hl2 server is no longer crashing, and all is stable. Primed for about 4 hours called it good.

4 hours isn't really long enough for a good test pass. In my opinion you should test it for 10-12 hours, some people have to do it for 24 hours before they call it good.

Can you show me a cpuZ screenshot ?

 

[fenderltd]

you know its getting ready to get crazy when Ice come on
& DFI Daishi... where the hell you been? Haven't seen you around.

I am glad everything is better and your oc worked out for you PAGE 6

 

[RegisteredToPost]

Can you show me a cpuZ screenshot ?

sure-What for?

 

[Ice Czar]

you know its getting ready to get crazy when Ice come on

naw just disappointed no one took note of my answer <sniff>

I feel so unappreciated

 

[paintb4707]

sure-What for?

Off-topic but what shell theme is that?

 

[J32P2006]

sure-What for?

Because now your right next to my speed(it's nice to see) and it's stable so this is the whole point of overclocking.

Free speed I guess.

You took a good bashing in this thread but it will get better from here.

 

[RegisteredToPost]

What speed are you at? Oh, CodeOpus is the theme.

 

[fenderltd]

naw just disappointed no one took note of my answer <sniff>
I feel so unappreciated

I will listen to you I think maybe this thread should be sticked, so next month the same thread isn't created again! LMFAO! I guess it kills time...

 

[chameleoneel]

overclocking my A64 3000 from 1.8 - 2.6 is definately a large difference. period. and its perfectly stable, never ever crashes.

 

[LanceDiamond]

I'm sure like 50 people have already said this - in this thread even lol - but anyway...

OC'ing solely because you expect some massive performance gain is probably a bad idea. For that matter, if you want a computer you just plug in and it damn wll better work without you having to tweak it much, go buy a whole system from Dell or something (and then remove al the crap they install and try to convince them to send you some damn CDs in case you'd ever like to reinstall the OS.)

For me anyway, OC'ing was just part of building a new PC - as someone else said, I wanted to see what was stable and what wasn't. Running at stock speed doesn't tell me that - it doesn't let me know if my cooling is working right because at stock speed, I may have some unknown problems that only crop up later. I enjoyed playing with the settings and figuring out what speed I could run the PC at. I found that I can run @ 2607mhz on a 4400 X2 - faster than a 4800 X2 for about $300 less. At this speed, it's completely stable - and I mean completely. If I had any instability, any crashes, reboots, blue screens, odd behaviour, or even what I consider hot temps (cpu > 50c or so), I'd slow it down. I have none of those things - no problems at all. None. So why would I NOT overclock given that?

 

[PopeKevinI]

It's not like you'll see huge insane performance benefits from the extra 200 mhz you'll get from overclocking.

If you're buying in the top 75%, overclocking won't give you a huge boost in performance to begin with, and by the end of your processor's life cycle, it won't put you up to 'modern' standards anyway. So what the fuck is the point?

If you want to waste your time tweaking FSB/RAM latency settings and worrying about instability, go for it.

I attempted overclocking my opteron, I set it back to default settings because of instability. My hl2 server started hard crashing....more than once. Resetting settings to default fixed the problems. meh... Just my thoughts

I'll probably be gaining 500 Mhz or so if I get the overclock I want on my new build...that's roughly a 15% increase. That's substantial, seeing as I've been known to bog down high-end servers for an hour or more. It will shave a lot of time off compression and conversion work without spending more money.

To me, the point of overclocking is to take hardware bought at half the price of top-of-the-line and make it perform like the most expensive product on the market. It's like buying a $25,000 car and making it perform like a $60,000 sports car. It's not necessarily because you need the performance...it's half because you want it and half because it's a challenge.

 

[Susquehannock]

Put all your fancy pants benchmarks aside. This would equal out to maybe 8-10 frames per second in x.x.x game title?

8-10 frames is pretty significant when you are running at 50-60fps. 15-20% increase.
And that was just from OCing & unlocking the video card. If I ran 3dMark at stock CPU/RAM
settings first the increase would probably be even more dramatic.

Actually thats a pretty decent increase...

1.4ghz AthlonXP... thats what a 1700+? now the 3200+ ran about 2.2 take off 200+ and id say hes got an easy 3100+ speed rating there. pretty decent speed boost. esp with that higher FSB.

The 6800 unlocks...

Not a massive increase but a noticeable increase in performance.

Thats a big performance increase over all with little pay out.

Exactly! .... thank you

I made it a point to attain certain components which were known to play well together, OCed well,
but didn't cost too much. And most of the parts were quite cheap actually.

CPU = $42 ... "low volt" Athlon Tbred B with unlocked multiplier
Mobo = $29 ... refurbished unit running strong for over a year
Vid card = $160 ... certain model which unlocked disabled pipelines

The only component which I payed a premium for was the RAM. Couldn't find any way around that.
These G.skill modules run nice & tight at OCed speeds which is important for this nForce2 system.

 

[Stugots]

Let me answer this post statement by statement...

It's not like you'll see huge insane performance benefits from the extra 200 mhz you'll get from overclocking.

You will with an extra 1000+mhz

If you're buying in the top 75%, overclocking won't give you a huge boost in performance to begin with, and by the end of your processor's life cycle, it won't put you up to 'modern' standards anyway. So what the fuck is the point?

Because I paid $150 for my 2.4C that performs better than a 3.4C which was something like $600 at the time when I bought my processor. Sure now its not as fast as the latest system, but it can still hold its own. I don't plan on upgrading for at least another year or so.

you want to waste your time tweaking FSB/RAM latency settings and worrying about instability, go for it.

It takes me 2 days, first day to tweak, second day for prime95. All my overclocked systems have never had any stability issues.

I attempted overclocking my opteron, I set it back to default settings because of instability. My hl2 server started hard crashing....more than once. Resetting settings to default fixed the problems. meh... Just my thoughts

I've never overclocked an AMD system, can't really help you out. But I'm sure if you asked some specific question there would be someone more than happy to help you.

This is my home server. It has been running all day everday since the day I built it at this speed. No stability issues. It has alot more speed left in it, but I leave it at 3.8 because I can leave the fan speeds low enough for near silent running.

Why do I overclock? I overclock because it is a cheap (high performance memory/cooling/motherboard are not free.) way of getting more performance out of a processor. I like the braging rights of saying I run a processor 1000+mhz over stock speed. But, to each his own.

 

[wwswimming]

God, i just had a good reason, "why overclocking".

this is a high density connector, molded plastic with typically plated metal contacts. the bottom has something that looks like solder balls.

the IGES file was 30 MB. the part file in the CAD program i'm using ended up being 8 1/2 MB.

how it looked locked up
http://www.geocities.com/wwswimming/locked_up_good__.jpg

3D isometric view of the connector. no idea what the brown disc is, yet.
http://www.geocities.com/wwswimming/locked_up_good_3_.jpg

solder ball things on the underside
http://www.geocities.com/wwswimming/locked_up_good_2_.jpg

i guess if i really wanted to be scientific about it i'd un-overclock my machine and repeat the import to see what effect it has.

the CAD program is using up about 215 MB of memory; the system has 4 x 512 MB.

Solidworks is running too, and that eats up memory.

guess i got a reason to get a new computer

except for budgetary considerations :-(

 

[zer0signal667]

In hopes of cleaning this thread up, I have deleted a number of posts which contained personal attacks and other stupid nonsense. In the process I realized that there were way too many of these posts, so I'm not going to do it anymore. Next time, I'm taking the easy route and clicking the "Close Thread" button instead.

 

[superkdogg]

It's not like you'll see huge insane performance benefits from the extra 200 mhz you'll get from overclocking.

If you're buying in the top 75%, overclocking won't give you a huge boost in performance to begin with, and by the end of your processor's life cycle, it won't put you up to 'modern' standards anyway. So what the fuck is the point?

If you want to waste your time tweaking FSB/RAM latency settings and worrying about instability, go for it.

I attempted overclocking my opteron, I set it back to default settings because of instability. My hl2 server started hard crashing....more than once. Resetting settings to default fixed the problems. meh... Just my thoughts

But if you're smart about it, you don't buy the top 75% and try to OC. My year old, $150 (then) Winchester core is still as fast as any single core other than the FX-57. At 2.7 GHz, I have a cpu that benchmarks (and otherwise performs) like a $500 chip for about 1/3 the price....and I always do this. My other rigs are a Celeron D oc'd from 2.4 to 3.6, a Mobile P4 oc'd from 1.6 to 2.4, and a AthlonXP TBred 1700+ @ 2.2 GHz. All on air, the P4 and the A64 are on stock air. SO, I overclock because knowledge on how to do it well+a little bit of research=free money (or performance, depending) for me.

Plus, I really hope that you knew that you'd get thrown under the bus for posting this in these forums.