Question Why Overclock?

[carocuore]

Depends on the situation. I used to overclock because my computer was ancient for the time and couldn't afford a new one, I also had to get into some modding, adding heatsinks and fans to cool down the VRMs and chipset on my low end board to prevent it to burst into flames any moment, tuning took a ton of time, it's not just crank up some values and you're done.

Some nowadays overclock just to get cool numbers on synth benchmarks on their fancy high end components, I'm old school and take overclocking as something you can (and have?) to do if you want to extend the life of your obsolete CPU, card, memory or whatever. I know extreme OC is a thing and respect those who do it but those OCs aren't practical which is what at least I look for when doing it, LN2 and hitting 7-8GHz is nice but you can't use the computer like that as a daily driver.

 

[Viking2121]

I do it for fun and lets me understand the platform more, I like tinkering and sqeezing all that I can out of my system, Although Nvidia, AMD and Intel kind of made it boring now, AMD got their PBO, so for example my 5800x boosts to 5.1ghz and a all core at 4.7ghz, all I did was allow 200mhz more to the PBO offsets and play with the voltage curve, thats it. Got my ram to 3866mhz but thats as far as I can go keeping infinity fabric 1 to 1 with memory speed.

The last CPU that I had fun overclocking was my FX8320, only because I was able to get over a 1ghz overclock and there was some settings that would give decent gains, it was fun, but not practical as it went from a 125 tdp to like a near 300 tdp, it was good at heating up my room, But I was able to get 5.1ghz out of the chip and it ran that way for years, I beat the snot out of that thing and its still going in another PC although stock.

The last GPU that I had fun overclocking just because it was different was the Vega 64, a higher core clock didn't mean you'd get more performance, it was a weird card, my 5700xt I did the power play mod and it idk, wasn't as fun, my 6800xt I'm still playing with it, got it to 2500mhz from its stock 2300mhz.

I do miss the old days where even a 6 mhz jump was a good note worthy jump lol

 

[kerberos_20]

i used to overclock things bacause performance was not enough, be it CPU or GPU...bottlenecks happened and it gave more fps/more playable gaming experience...

well now i dont overclock because i have low performance (GPU is the only exception)
i do keep ram as fast as it can go,its samsung B die which is 2133MHz sticks with XMP 3200 CL14 running 3733 CL16, why? well XMP is overclock, and its not a limiting factor, it has lifetime warranty, no overclock worries there...and faster ram with lower latencies means better user experience...system feels butter smooth and u get higher minimum FPS, zero stuttering (really nice frame time), ISR is low aswell
GPU auto overclocks on its own, so i just did volt mod , slaped 240mm AIO on it and it auto OC when it needs it (1070ti runs as 1080)
CPU auto overclock itself aswell, so i did undervolt it so it reaches higher clock at same wattage, overal wattage dropped, it runs below PBO so cant be considered overclock

anyway point is to have better runing system

 

[boju]

Overclocking these days is pretty much useless, not like the old days with 1st/2nd/3rd/maybe 4th core i's chasing 1000ghz+. Cpus today are already there with stock turbo.

144hz is pretty cool look when fps is up there.

 

[Mandark]

Overclocking these days is pretty much useless, not like the old days with 1st/2nd/3rd/maybe 4th core i's chasing 1000ghz+. Cpus today are already there with stock turbo.

144hz is pretty cool look when fps is up there.

Yep. Darn near useless

 

[tennis2]

You can BCLK OC a non-K 11th gen using a Z series mobo, yes?

Overclocking isn't what it used to be (regarding % increase over stock). Nowadays Intel/AMD/Nvidia are implementing more and more factory "auto overclocking" functions on their chips to the point where you're generally not gaining a lot. Anymore, you undervolt to extract maximum frequency within the power limits and that's about it. Different manufacturers have different power limit strategies. AMD/Nvidia have a set power limit that can be sustained infinitely. Intel has their power limit tiers and durations (which can be overriden in the mobo BIOS, and often are by default)

*Undervolting is a common practice in overclocking. Basically just means minimizing voltage at a given frequency while still maintaining stability. If your target is stock frequency, that results in less than stock voltage which reduces power/heat/noise. If your target is stock voltage, that affords you slightly greater frequency.

*Overvolting (IMO) means using voltage that is greater than stock to achieve ever greater frequency. Not exactly a polar opposite of undervolting, but nobody is out there tryna run more voltage than what's necessary to sustain a given frequency.


I generally undervolt my CPU/GPU as soon as I'm done testing system stability at stock. I've always followed the mantra of "if you're not exceeding stock voltage, you're not gonna hurt anything". AFAIK, auto-OC functionality from Intel/AMD/Nvidia are still referencing a frequency-voltage curve set by the manufacturer that is developed as an envelope of fab variance just like they always have. Basically the stock frequency-voltage curve is going to be stable for 100% of chips. It's up to the user to do stability testing on their specific chip if they want to tinker.