Features - QOTW: do you still overclock your PC?

[Tattysnuc]

Poll has worked for me! Yay! Thanks Hexus...

[Ferral]

I have overclocked my Phenom II X4 from 3.4 up to 3.8 stable on the stock cooler just to see what I could get out of it if I wanted to. Marginal performance gain in 3DMark11 but not worth keeping it that way in all honesty.

I dont do video encoding and the multi threaded games have yet to require anything faster than quad 3Ghz. Dont even think anything has required 3Ghz so far actually, come across quite a few that just say any quad core and a few that state quad @ 2.8 or higher.

Pair that with a Radeon 6950 or GeForce 560Ti (or better) and 8Gb system ram and you get decent framerates in 1920x1080 resolution with highest detail settings.

[Noxvayl]

Good work on the poll Hexus, thanks

[Flakvin]

I still overclock. Pushed my E8200 to 3.6GHz recently from 2.66GHz, it gives a nice boost in performance in Skyrim/BFBC2/GTA4. The near 1000MHz extra really does make a difference with today's games.

My current overclock I have has meant that I can hold off upgrading for several more months.

[brasco]

Heck yes I still OC, 2 reasons, firstly it's good for profit - cheaper part runs as fast as stock 4x expensive part. Secondly it's so fricking easy!

My PC is overclocked, pretty much by accident. My somewhat lovely Asus board looked at my 2600k, on first boot and upped it to a rock-solid 3.4Ghz. I'll take the free overclock

3.4 is stock


cheers
brasc

[TooNice]

My priorities have shifted from squeezing as much Prime/Orthos stable performance for my £, to as much Prime/Orthos stable performance as my cooler can afford with the fan at 800RPM. Basically, if a chip is known to overclock very well, I'll take a punt, but only if it doesn't increase the sound of my system (which needn't be completely quiet, but very quiet). The days of screaming Deltas are long, long past me.

I hardly try to OC GFX card nowadays. For a start, they tend to be hotter than CPUs (harder to cool quietly), have lower overclockable headroom to CPUs in general, and unless times have changed (i.e. there are better ways now), are more time consuming to test for stability. It's easy enough to let Orthos run for an entire week if you feel inclined to, but I don't want to spend hours watching 3DMarks trying to pick up graphic corruptions.. and I don't want to find them in-game.

Granted GFX overclocks do tend to translate to more in-game gains too, but I have also eased up in what I consider acceptable performance (wanting my PC very quiet usually rule out a top end GFX card).

[vrykyl]

Overclocking's a dirty addiction - I've never built a pc for myself (or most of my mates) that wasnt overclocked, my current 2700k is happily overclocked at 5ghz, and I've overclocked all my chips - from my still all time favourite chip; my AMD athlon XP-M 2500+ cpu - right back to my first pentium 3's.

I even had a couple of years with a regassed Prometeia Mach II unit (bought from over-clock.co.uk before they shut up shop, and regassed by Phil at Extreme Prometeia before he sadly closed down as well) - this i7 I have now isnt my first 5ghz chip

Lately have taken to overclocking my mobile phone as well if that counts? My Galaxy S2 is running overclocked and under-volted at 1.6ghz plus a modest GPU overclock too, and the wife's Galaxy S1 is running at 1.4ghz!!

Just cant help myself - who doesnt like free extra performance?

[Biscuit]

I have overclocked a lot of peoples PCs however of my own, i have overclocked a S939 AMD Opteron X2 185, an Intel C2D E4500 (which was RUBBISH) and an Intel C2Q Q6600. I haven't yet overclocked my AMD PII X4 955 but i think i might have a bit of a tweak today

To be honest, i have been using it a while and i haven't noticed it holding anything back, maybe thats because its performance is in line with the overclocked Q6600 and my SSD has boosted general computing speeds?

Either way im not in a rush to overclock, even though it is a bit of a waste of my H100.

[Shooty*]

So... do any of you water cool your phones?

[mark22]

I did once but it was more of a bathroom mishap.

[Biscuit]

I did once but it was more of a bathroom mishap.

[TaintedShirt]

@mark22
Were you using Silver or Domestos as biocide?

[scaryjim]

tweaking as I speak, for the first time with my current rig. I agree that mostnew computers don't need overclocking, but there's a certain amount of satisfaction to be gained from taking - say - a £25 second hand Pentium Dual Core, and ramping it up tp 3.46GHz

Now, let's see if I can push it any further

[Jonatron]

I think I've been underclocking more than overclocking in the last few years. Overclocking just seemed to make more of a noticable difference in the past, and now I'm more concerned about quietness, stablility and power consumption.

[Fraz]

I probably wouldn't bother if I didn't do crunching for the World Community Grid. A 25% overclock that is stable 24/7 is usually achievable quite easily, which means 25% more work done for the good of humanity It's one of the few use-cases that the CPU auto-overclocking turbo modes don't really help with, as all CPU cores are fully loaded. So... manually overclocking the CPU really is the best way forward.

[Percy1983]

Personally I just can't help but do it, I remember my first OC of getting a e4300 to 3.24ghz, I have since overlooked a few PC for friends families.

As it is one of the reasons I have upgraded my current setup for so long is my Q9550 OC'ed to 3.5ghz is amazing.

As it is I do some heavy video editing as well as gaming so really see the benefits.