Hardware Your Opinion on Overclocking

[Kirito-kun]

Overclocking... A risky endeavour with great rewards. It is a compromise between longevity and zero-day performance. It may result in higher frame rates or dead components. It is a decision that all PC games have to make. To overclock or not to overclock, that is the question.

I personally have seen reasonable and careful overclocking to be something that all PC gamers should do. A carefully calibrated overclock can greatly increase performance while having a small impact on life span. It is temperatures that kill chips, not higher frequencies. As long as the temperatures are low, an overclocked chip will last a long time. I have ran both my CPU and GPU overclocked for almost 2 years and have not encountered any issue. However, that's just my personal experience.

What are your opinions on overclocking? Do you partake in it or do you find it too risky?

 

[Bobbybangin]

I overclock. I have an i7 950. I'm going to upgrade to the 990 soon. Until then I've overclocked this one from 3.07 to 3.8. Doesn't sound like much but I get much better performance. Especially with my emulators. Another plus I've noticed is that before I overclocked my computer always ran at a steady 3.07. Now it runs at lower idle speeds unless I play game or something and then it will run at full overclocked speed. To me, that seems to make sense that it would cause less stress on my processor when it's not needed to run to at full power. I've been at this speed for a year now and no issues whatsoever.

 

[trumpet-205]

I once overclock, currently running at stock. To be honest, the time it takes to finish an overclocking process is too long for me. I would've to jump back and forward, find a reasonable settings, then stress the system for extended amount of time. Being a busy person, that is too much for me.

Plus I'm running 24/7 system, and reliability is more of a concern than burst of performance.

 

[Celice]

I overclock without increasing the voltages.I find it the safest route.

Recently overclocked my i5 and was able to run Ultra settings in Metro: Last Light at 45+ fps average. Before, that's what I got on High. I was very pleased with the gain.

 

[Thanatos Telos]

It's viagra for your e-peen.

EDIT: Seriously, it's only good for older CPUs. Piledrivers, Ivy/Sandy, and Haswell really don't need it to give a nice experience.

 

[YayMii]

I overclocked my GPU since Nvidia put supersafe voltage limits on their newer cards, so it's very unlikely that anyone's going to fry their card (unless they unlock the limiter). Because of this, I might as well since it's free performance with a bit of effort.
My CPU remains at stock clocks though, it's running on an HP mobo which probably has no protection against overclocks, and probably doesn't have very good cooling. A higher quality mobo would be needed for safe overclocking.

 

[ilman]

My laptop gets quite warm without over clocking, so no, I don't over clock.

 

[Rydian]

Pros

• You can get the power of a more expensive component out of a cheaper one (most common I think).
• You can reach higher power levels not normally sold stock.

Cons

• Higher power usage in most cases.
• More heat production, meaning...
  • Your cooling system needs to work harder.
  • Your parts will die sooner than stock.
• Need to have specific setups (mainly the motherboard nowadays) in order to OC effectively, or at all.
• Overclock ability is on a chip-by-chip basis, somebody else could OC their CPU 0.5ghz, while you get the same model and can barely pass 0.1ghz OC.

 

[PityOnU]

IMO The amount of risk that comes with overclocking, in addition to the time it takes to get everything working correctly, greatly outweighs the potential performance increase.

If you want a faster chip, save up the money and buy a faster chip from the start. Freedom isn't free, bitches.

 

[Rayder]

I prefer reliability and stability to a few extra frames per second. I think it's funny that some people will buy the fastest components available and then overclock them. If I feel my current setup is no longer fast enough, I'll just buy something faster, not waste my time overclocking my old setup. The fact that I don't bother with "new" games anymore, I only have to upgrade now when my current rig craps out.

 

[Armadillo]

Pros
Cons

• More heat production, meaning...
  • Your cooling system needs to work harder.
  • Your parts will die sooner than stock.

Parts have voltage and thermal limits, stay within them and there is no reason it will die quicker. Besides that, what about the difference between stock cooling & aftermarket/high end cooling.

My x4 955 is overclocked and only hits 50C give or take, as I'm using a good high end cooler. The stock cooler would easily hit 55-60C at stock voltage and speed because it's junk and is only designed to keep it under 62C. So more heat on stock for me.

 

[Rydian]

Parts have voltage and thermal limits, stay within them and there is no reason it will die quicker. Besides that, what about the difference between stock cooling & aftermarket/high end cooling.

My x4 955 is overclocked and only hits 50C give or take, as I'm using a good high end cooler. The stock cooler would easily hit 55-60C at stock voltage because it's junk and is only designed to keep it under 62C. So more heat on stock for me.

I'm not talking about catastrophic failure, I'm talking about wear on the parts. When parts run hotter, they die sooner than when they run cooler, it's a scientific fact.

In fact, it's the reason that IPC has been increasing instead of the clock rate. The higher the clock rate, the quicker the shit dies, so that's why after the P4 era (when Ghz was everything) everybody started moving to new architectures and more cores and stuff, to try to get more and more processing done with less cycling per second. It's also one of the reasons that everybody's looking into new cooling methods for CPUs even though your average desktop CPU is nowhere close to overheating... the cooler they can keep the chip, the more performance they can get out of it without it wearing out too soon (i.e. within the average computer's life span).

I mean there's also other reasons for the new cooling tech (stacking chips so that area isn't a flat rectangle), but it's mainly to preserve parts.

 

[The Catboy]

I often find the cons out weigh the pros with overclocking and often just end upgrading my hardware instead.

 

[FAST6191]

I learned the science behind it all (mainly as it is the science behind normal electronics, chip operations and heat transfer), occasionally get a good giggle out of those engaged in overclocking being more superstitious than anybody I have ever met (these people make the peerblock fans look logical) and will only tend to do it if I feel like blowing something up or the performance of it is just that little bit lower than I need for a throwaway device.

Normally though I am all about the stability and as I am not rich enough/bored enough to build and maintain a hardened/workstation class machine for my general operations I do not go in for it and instead I might even underclock on occasion. Similarly I usually find properly setting up an OS, using a nice hard drive and maybe sticking a bit more RAM in does for everything I need to do.
Also if the graphics make sense and the fps is somewhere around the 30 mark (hopefully someone properly cracks the motion blur thing and we can stop the 60fps farce) I am usually good enough with games and that is pretty easy to do.

 

[Rydian]

Everybody could always buy crappy LCDs with a 500ms refresh rate!

 

[CompassNorth]

Once I build a PC I'm going to overclock.
Not going to do any insane clock speed or anything, just the same of what the majority of the people are doing.

 

[Naridar]

I once killed my Pentium III CPU by overclocking it so since then I'm especially careful. That 10-or-so extra FPS isn't worth replacing the CPU for half my monthly income.

 

[FAST6191]

I once killed my Pentium III CPU by overclocking it so since then I'm especially careful. That 10-or-so extra FPS isn't worth replacing the CPU for half my monthly income.

I can certainly appreciate the sentiment. However I do have to point out the P3 line ran incredibly hot which did not help overclocking and did not have a great deal of anything in the way of thermal cutout.

 

[Ethevion]

I don't overclock. I use an i5 3570k at stock and it runs games just fine. Don't really care about increasing my FPS to a point where I can't even tell the difference.