Is it worth paying for pre-overclocked?

[nlr]

Hello,

I am new to this community and I was wondering is it worth paying for pre-overclocked cpu's as I heard its not too difficult to achieve the same results at home.

For example I am interested in buying an i7 930 and I want it @ 4ghz..

How achievable is this to accomplish?

Regards,
Nick.

[alsenior]

with a good cooler and board and half decent ram you could do this very easily yourself and save yourself the money

[nlr]

CPU: Intel Core i7 930 2.80GHz @ 4.00GHz
Mobo: Asus Rampage III Extreme Intel X58
RAM: Corsair XMS3 (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Triple Channel
Cooling: Noctua NH-D14 or Water Cooling

[arthurleung]

TBH after I spend endless hours trying to get my i7 stable, I would say it is probably worth spending extra to get it pre-overclocked, say 100 quids.

Putting a 930 up to 4Ghz will result in tremendous heat as well as a lot of stress to the rest of the subsystems. It will likely need to over-volt the memory subsystem and it could result in a sudden death. Buy pre-overclocked will let the company deal with any failure resulted from the overclock.

I used a cheap Zalman heatsink for my i7 950 and I only just manage to hit 3.8Ghz as the temperature was too high. Also I was not comfortable with all the excess power usage, which resulted in a reduced performance/watt.

[Biscuit]

It all depends on you. Do you have the time, patience and understanding to do the research and get the job done properly? If you do then its great fun and quite rewarding however as arthur has stated, there are risks involved and 4GHz is quite a high target with a number of obsticles.

[Hawker1986]

It depends on your technical knowledge and how confident you feel, personally I always OC myself, its good fun, rewarding and saves some dosh, but then im happy to take the risks. If your not and just want an easy life then feel free to spend the extra to have someone else do it.

Hawker

[Jasp]

As Arthur has already mentioned the main advantage to buying pre-overclocked is that you still have a warranty, any overclocking/overvoltage pretty much invalidates most warranty's.

[Behemoth]

You loose warranty though on the overclock if you flash the motherboard to the latest bios. Looked into this myself and for the few extra quid it costs I'd say buy the exact same hardware thats on offer and put the rest of the money to a decent case/cooling for the case you've got.

Then overclock it yourself.

[Bugbait]

It depends on your technical knowledge and how confident you feel, personally I always OC myself, its good fun, rewarding and saves some dosh, but then im happy to take the risks. If your not and just want an easy life then feel free to spend the extra to have someone else do it.

+1 to this.

I spent all night (so about 8 hours BEFORE doing intensive tests which yielded more tweaks) getting my 920 to a stable state @4Ghz. I enjoy the "challenge" so would never pay someone to do it. However, if you don't have the knowledge, interest, patience, or time then it's probably better pay someone esle to do it for you.

Depending on the CPU you get, it could take a lot of tweaking to get it right. Then again, I think my 920 isn't a great sample which made things harder.

[arthurleung]

+1 to this.

I spent all night (so about 8 hours BEFORE doing intensive tests which yielded more tweaks) getting my 920 to a stable state @4Ghz. I enjoy the "challenge" so would never pay someone to do it. However, if you don't have the knowledge, interest, patience, or time then it's probably better pay someone esle to do it for you.

Depending on the CPU you get, it could take a lot of tweaking to get it right. Then again, I think my 920 isn't a great sample which made things harder.

You certainly is lucky, or just spamming the voltage? I spent 2 weeks trying to get close to 4Ghz and I keep getting prime error about 12 hours into testing at 3.9Ghz. Even 3.8Ghz was a hard task to tweak the voltage. Managed to get a pretty high uncore though. Happy with the overclock since I didn't need a beefier power supply nor a beefier heatsink nor paying a higher electricity bill.

No offense but I would guess you turned HT off to get 4Ghz?

[aXeR]

Is it me or has everyone missed the obvious pointer? With a pre-overclocked system your guaranteed cherry picked parts that will overclock. Whilst most equipment will overclock without too much aggro these days, its not a dead cert!

I guess the problem is that you will often pay an undeserved premium for this 'assurance'

[Bugbait]

You certainly is lucky, or just spamming the voltage? I spent 2 weeks trying to get close to 4Ghz and I keep getting prime error about 12 hours into testing at 3.9Ghz. Even 3.8Ghz was a hard task to tweak the voltage. Managed to get a pretty high uncore though. Happy with the overclock since I didn't need a beefier power supply nor a beefier heatsink nor paying a higher electricity bill.

No offense but I would guess you turned HT off to get 4Ghz?

Lucky? From what I’ve seen on various forums, 4Ghz is almost a given on enthusiast cooling (massive air or water). Unlucky is not reaching 4Ghz. Good is about 4.2Ghz and “lucky” is anything above that (seen a few 4.4’s and higher on lower voltage than I run).

I had to tweak each key setting one at a time and test and test. Once I found mostly stable settings I did a fresh install on the OS (in case of previous corruption). I’m pumping a Load Line Calibrated voltage of 1.381v (CPU-Z shows 1.375) into the CPU for 4Ghz. This seems high and thus I consider myself unlucky with this sample.

HT is on. I only ran HT off for about 30 minutes as a test. Yes, it was far easier to get stable but that would defeat the purpose of owning an i7 9xx IMO. It would be like pulling the side off your case and blasting a household fan into it to achieve a stable overclock. It has to run in its true form, with all bells and whistles enabled for an overclock to be deemed stable and successful in my books.

[Hawker1986]

You certainly is lucky, or just spamming the voltage? I spent 2 weeks trying to get close to 4Ghz and I keep getting prime error about 12 hours into testing at 3.9Ghz. Even 3.8Ghz was a hard task to tweak the voltage. Managed to get a pretty high uncore though. Happy with the overclock since I didn't need a beefier power supply nor a beefier heatsink nor paying a higher electricity bill.

No offense but I would guess you turned HT off to get 4Ghz?

Looks like you may have got a bad chip, got mine to 4ghz stable in less than an hour HT enabled, after that I was just tweaking the best vcore and loadline settings for the clock. Also I notice from your sig your using 12GB RAM, presumably with all 6 slots filled, if that was the case at the time of OC it could have been limiting the ease of clocking and the stability.
Hawker

[davidcrofter]

I have seen some of these 4ghz pre-overclocked systems hitting borderline scary temperatures and of course you then have to factor in system noise ... I think with a bit of reading and a bit of tweaking you may be able to do a better job yourself as only you can be the judge of what you consider safe voltate, temps and indeed noise levels - these guys just churn them out.

[Bugbait]

Also I notice from your sig your using 12GB RAM, presumably with all 6 slots filled, if that was the case at the time of OC it could have been limiting the ease of clocking and the stability.

Good call. I’ve read 6 vs 3 slots dropping the top overclock for a CPU anywhere from 100-250Mhz at times. My memory controller seems a bit weak so moving to 12Gig would likely kill my current overclock.

[arthurleung]

Didn't notice you are on water cooling, my bad.

With my alright cooler, I am already hitting 80'C at max load. This is at 1.25V so can't go higher voltage. And really the whole system is already pulling 350W from the socket.