All scenarios, for the "normal user".
- You will never escape the thermal ceilings of a build/design (especially true for mobile devices).
- Money invested in OC equipment/OC capable/delimited hardware would be better invested in the next "step up" (performance based) stock part, or saved for the next upgrade down the road.
- Benefits for "normal users" are 10% performance (clockrate) gain on CPUs, and maybe 5-10 fps on OCing GPUs. 10% gain on CPUs is not noticeable in day by day scenarios, 5-10 fps might - but mostly in edge cases (arguments to follow).
- The downsides are either huge or costly. Meaning increased fanspeeds on GPUs that you will notice (back to thermal design...), or having to go or better aftermarket equipment (can be costly). On the PC side everyone will start to ask for a premium for even the privilege. The cpu you are buyng suddenly has to be the unlocked version, the motherboard you are buying has to be the one series where limiters are not set, the GPU you are buying should be the one with the best thermal package out of the box which is sold factory overclocked, at a premium to begin with - because the manufacturers know what they are selling and to whom.
Here are the scenaries where OCing makes sense.
- If you are a cryptocurrency miner, that has to get his cycles in, before the problems to solve get harder.
- If you are 5 fps away from either stable 30 or 60 frames on "the game you love"
. If you are running a rendering farm and your profitability is directly related to time spent and not so much to upfront cost
The thing is, the scenario where you absolutely need 5 more frames in any game "of the generation", are few and fae inbetween, because if you are not Crytech, you design for whats available on the market on average at "time of release", and the difference between high and ultra (/the next step up) is usually more than people can jump reliably by OCing.
OCing is mostly a market that works very well for "its own customers" and not for anyone else. Meaning highly specialiced, fringe, you know the type.
There might be exceptions ("that one part where the manufacturer wanted to sell down his capabilities, and forgot to lock, .."), but those arent the rule. As a general notion "you've been roped in" is a much better notion to hold in regard to "what overclocking can do for you", than the notion that it leads to great benefits in most cases.
If you are getting +25% performance out of a stock configuration (thermal design), you are not overclocking. (See PSP -) Overclocking lives within the narrow niche of chip manufacturers not reliably being able to hit a higher performance goal. (Which brings us back to yield - and the fact that some chips fall out of manufacturing better than others, which I havent even used for the argument in here so far. Neither have I used decreased lifespan (temperature), because there are better arguments to make.).
If you are hung up on the "restoring" part - read my previous posting again. You cant restore stuff, thats not reliably there. When the PSP was designed the chipset was a middle of the market performer, that was then underclocked to fit power consumption needs for the mobile space. The X1 is a top of the market, high performance piece, that the manufacturer will be very happy to sell "lower yield" versions of to any corperate client. That you would be able to "restore it" to X1 performance levels, most likely is a myth.
The thing with "dudebros" only ever read "X1" and not the "close to" part, is very strong in this forum.
edit: There is a possibility that I have this argument backwards in relation to the X1 chipset, and it goes like this: nVidia put out fake "can hold them for 10 seconds on our thermal budget" values for their Shield TV to begin with (see: https://gbatemp.net/threads/confirm...tock-nvidia-tegra-x1-no-modifications.464725/ ), in which case GCN and WiiU emulation might be in - but with a big questionmark over its existence (can we reach Nintendos emulation efficiency - without seeing any of the source code and less driver documentation).
Its important to understand, that even in that case there is nothing to "restore" performance wise. N will run with the frequency that can reliably be reproduced within thermal limits (when docked, power consumption limitations dont factor in).
If you are talking about "restoring" docked performance in portable mode - that may be possible, but its not advisable (back to the 2 hours of portable PSP fun argument, fanspeed, ...).
Last edited by notimp,
