To Overclock or Not To Overclock, That is the Question

[insaNity 0]

In response to that article:

 

Quote:

Amdmb.com has posted an editorial called To Overclock or Not To Overclock, That is the Question.

 

Let’s get down to business. Why overclock? Why not overclock? Anyone who knows me, or has seen my posts in the forums knows that I totally do not understand the point of overclocking (or modding for that matter). Sure, I am a die hard SETI cruncher but, as evident from the stats, there is no need to overclock in order to find little green men faster, play games faster, or render a 3D model faster. The point is simple – it wastes money. Sure, it gives you bragging rights, but does that really get you anywhere? The answer is no.

 

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Yes, Overclocking is overtated. For many people overclocking costs more than it is worth, and causes a lot of hassle down the track.

 

For me, I try to gain as much performance as possible.

If I can stabily overclock without spending any extra money, and notice a performance increase, (Like I have with my current 1.5 year old system) I do not see any reason not to.

 

Overclocking was originally about SAVING money, not wasting it on extreme cooling devices so they can brag. That is SO geeky.

 

I don't even consider overclocking when purchasing equipment, but I try and see it a bonus if it works. You should NEVER overclock until your system is getting a bit old.

 

And that's the way overclocking should be!

[JP- 0]

Yes its totally pointless but i do it anyway because i just like to get more than what i paid for if you know what i mean and its fun

 

Friends just think im weird for overclocking (those who know what it is) an already fast computer and then they thought i was insane to cut a hole in the side and stick some lights inside but hey

 

And the guy is right, it gets you nowhere, and i agree that ppl use the argument that it saves money and basically it doesnt in the long run (usually).

[insaNity 0]

totally pointless? I think not.

I'm talking simple overclocking

 

my celeron 300a CPU I changed the bus speed from 66mhz to 100mhz for a 450mhz CPU and got a HUGE performance increase.

 

Now I have my 733mhz CPU, 66mhz bus running at 75mhz and Have my CPU running at 825mhz. Noticable performance increase in games.

 

Stable as hell. Uptime 2 weeks+.

 

I get no extra cooling, no case mods, nothing. I try it with a simple setting in the BIOS. If it works it works and it doesnt it doesnt.

 

It saves me money. simple as that.

[Brian Frank 0]

I do it partially for speed and partially for the sheer hell of it.

[JP- 0]

heh nice one. You choose the celeron as an example as a pro for overclocking, thats like me choosing the amd k6-2 as an example of a con.

 

Course your gonna get a huge improvement with a celeron because they clock so insanly high from such a low speed. I really mean athlon and p4 overclocking (not he NW) because with standard cooling your gonna get about 100-200mhz on the athlon and 200-300mhz on the p4. And is that gonna really be noticable?

[Brian Frank 0]

I've noticed that too. I've gotten better OC's out of the cheap chips from both AMD and Intel. I've gotten an extra 274MHz out of my Duron 800 and got 100 out of a 400MHz Celeron I. Currently, my 1.4GHz T-Bird, AHYJA-Y is running at 1.56GHz, and I have yet to be able to hit a 200MHz OC out of it. My dual P3's can't get much more than a 34MHz OC before my system will hose up--an my RAM is pretty decent too.

[clutch 1]

The cheaper chips have smaller and/or less complicated onboard caches, hence the ability to overclock higher. If you notice the large cache Xeons (like 1MB and 2MB models) are still stuck below 1GHz due to the large cache amounts.

[Brian Frank 0]

I'd never really thought about that one.

[JP- 0]

But then if that was true the little duron would clock higher than the athlon and as it is it seems to get stuck at 1000mhz ish.

 

Must be other more sinister factors at work.

[clutch 1]

Well, it is true, but AMD is also notorious is for rating their procs very close to their absolute limits anyway, which is why they tend to run a bit warmer than their Intel counterparts at the same speed. Right now, the fastest Xeon with 1 or 2MB of cache is 900MHz, and those are both expensive and rare to get a hold of. Remember the hard time AMD had with the 750MHz+ Athlon classics and their external caches? AMD had to drop the cache speed dividers from 1/2 to 2/5 in order to keep on making "faster" (faster in clock speed anyway) processors to keep up with Intel who was using onboard cache by then. Up until that point, AMD was making all kinds of promises about cache configurations that would go up to 8MB on a single processor. However, I have yet to see them get beyond 512KB at any speed, while Intel has had 1 and 2MB variants out for a long time, and that's why they are popular in the server market (among other reasons) because large cache amounts help a great deal in database applications.

 

Onboard cache lends itself heavily to the performance of the processor, but at the same time can increase its chance of failure at high speeds. That's why the Celeron "A" did so well, since it used a really small amount of on-die cache that ran at full speed vs. separate cache chips, and they smoked the equivalent PIIs in some apps (like games) while they would fade out in other apps (like SQL/Oracle apps) where larger caches were more useful. But those same PIIs couldn't overclock much at all due to the cache amount/configuration, much like the current AMD crop has problems because they are already running close to their thermal limits as it is.

[insaNity 0]

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heh nice one. You choose the celeron as an example as a pro for overclocking, thats like me choosing the amd k6-2 as an example of a con.

I use it because that's what I did. I have also successfully overclocked an AMD chip in the past (133 to 160mhz in order to get it to play (then) high quality movies). So there is a perfect example of useful overclocking.

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Course your gonna get a huge improvement with a celeron because they clock so insanly high from such a low speed. I really mean athlon and p4 overclocking (not he NW) because with standard cooling your gonna get about 100-200mhz on the athlon and 200-300mhz on the p4. And is that gonna really be noticable?

True. The newer CPU's don't overclock as much, but the benchmarks still prove a significant performance boost. It doesn't hurt to run a benchmark or 2 after you overclock to see if you should keep the settings or not.