Overclocking---real performance gain?

[winkdaddy123]

Ok, I am a complete noob and have never overclocked....this year I will have an I7 920 build...what are the "real" gains I will see if I overclock this cpu? I dont care about numbers and scores....I mean every day benefits....are we really talking night and day difference in practical applications and games? I am trying to visualize how much better it would really be..

Thanks!

 

[jeanluclariviere]

The I7 is a top of the line chip - I've never owned or used one, but I can certainly imagine that OC'ing it would improve the day to day performances. Especially when your build gets a little sloppy after a bit of abuse. ie; downloading, installing, web-browsing.

As long as you maintain your harddrives and manage your OS you may not need the increased speed - however, if you do, you'l notice reduced timings in many applications such as rendering, compressing, installing, and and of course gaming.

Play single player games ? Loading times can be reduced greatly - I remember the first time i switched from playing half life 1 on a pentium 3 750mhz to a 2.6ghz AMD haha.

Its entirely up to you - rule of thumb is, faster is better

 

[Shadow703793]

OC ing helps best in:

1. Audio/Video encoding/converting
2. Video editing
3. 3D Rendering (ie Blender, Maya,etc)
4. Gaming (mostly by OCing GPU than CPU these days)
5. Photo editing (ie CS4+ RAW files or large TIFF files)

 

[jsc]

OTOH, it is not "free" performance. You will need better cooling, a better motherboard (currently not a problem with the present X58 boards), better RAM, and generally a better, sometimes more powerful power supply.