13 replies to this topic

[twinpotter]

Just wanted to know peoples advice and thoughts on overclocking.Is it worth it,a waste of time or a big risk to your system/pc.Any input would be welcome!!

See links:

http://lifehacker.co...gaming-30799346

http://www.tweakguid...NVFORCE_11.html

[Pedro]

Time goes by so fast....... so why would we speed up the clock        



I believe it creates more problems then it solves.

[sky]

Well, whether it is worth it or not is up to one's own view on things. It's similar to tuning the engine of a car.
One thing you do by overclocking is voiding your warranty. While this may not be a problem in general, it could be. In case a part fails, it's up to the manufacturer to either replace it for something YOU did wrong or play high and mighty and refuse to RMA. The parts I have killed by being daft are all still in my possession. Some are quite expensive trophies of a hobby gone bad or a brainfart at the time (note the use of "some" - more than one, yes). To me it is something of a sport - see what you can get out of something - without killing it. The parts I have fried have all been killed by yours truly being stupid and / or not thinking - static electricity cost me one 9600tx gfx card, improper cooling after returning from a run on compressor cooling (CPU & GPU) cost me a 9800xt. In that particular instance I went from having edited the bios of my GFX card to significantly higher speeds cooled at -40°C via compressor to a passive aircoolled heatsink. I simply forgot to reduce the clocks and voltages - it didn't take more than 30 seconds to die. Chalk that one up to experience. The strangest, and sadly most expensive, blunder is still unexplicable to me - an Intel Dothan M780ES died within 6hours of my getting it - at the time that was about $800 gone to the shitter. I still can't figure out what happened.

Anyway, as for the uses of overclocking - my previous rig had a special processor and a few other gimmicks and in the end I ended up running it at stock speeds since I didn't need the extra power - full well knowing that I could increase the speeds by 50% with ease if I wanted or needed to. So for me nowadays overclocking is mostly just trying to see the maximum speed and performance I can get out of my parts and then reducing the performance to a level I need (which usually is above stock level), however, I try to reduce the voltages needed by the parts to below stock. Why am I waisting potential performance like that? Well for one, very few applications ever fully used my last rig and only one has managed to be below my goal on this one (Crysis 3 had fps dip below 60fps quite a few times) so I don't really need the power (see above). And then there is the inherent problem with overclocking - If you do it properly and go for the top, you will need to increase the voltage applied to the parts to achieve the higher clock speeds. More juice = more chance for electromigration (http://en.wikipedia....lectromigration), put simply an internal corrosion of sorts of your circuitry. Applying more juice to get higher speeds also increases the TDP (thermal design power) - thus increasing the heat output of your puts, so you need better cooling. For the most part better cooling implies more noise - unless you go watercooling, which is what I am and have been doing for a few years now - but that's a considerable amount of dosh to the bill if you want to keep cool and quiet and yet still be fast.

I have been overclocking my kit for the better part of 10 years now and at times I went all out on it - as I said, I had two compressor cooling systems keeping my rig cooled properly (quiet noisy and adding up to 600 or so watts of additional power requirements) - while speeds where significantly higher, noise and heat in my room became an issue - plus of course the power bill. It was fun while it lasted - I managed to join the 100% club - which is to say overclock your cpu to double the speed is was shipped with (or more). Nowadays I have only overclocked my CPU, mildly I should say. In case I need more, I'll just up the speeds by 2-300 mhz and see if that will do - knowing that I could go another 5-600 more if i actually needed it.

As said, it's a sport, pointless for the most part, but fun. Yes, you can gain some performance, but do you really need it, I mean on a daily basis? I can only speak for myself and say "No!". But it's nice to know I could if I wanted to. Much like driving a 500bhp sedan/coupe - you could blitz everyone on the road if you wanted to, but you don't need to - until one fine Sunday morning you go out for a drive at dawn to enjoy the rush without the other morons on the road to just enjoy the feeling ...


OH wee, philosophical
/edit. typo in the last word, grrr (probably a bunch of others, too)

Edited by sky, Aug 26 2013 - 01:34 PM.

[MECH]

I doubt if it helps much for GPL, overclocking your videocard i mean.
Upping the cpu would be a better option. Thats more of a bottleneck then the graphics card.
Doing both would probably better. But you need to be aware of the fallpits.

Your equipment was designed to work within a certain range of voltage, temperature etc.
If you start fiddling with these values you might shorten the lifetime of these components.
That can be lengthened by using cooling devices. Question is do you want to spend time figuring this out or invest the money to facilitate it. I used to overclock my system just for some fun but in the end i stopped doing that.
Getting a better videocard or pc (2nd hand or new) was way easier and most of the time not so expensive either.

If you decide to do soread the instruction carefull and ground yourself.
I've seen countless people touching ram without it and saying that never was an issue.
Yup, sometimes that isn't but you can't always tell. Static causes unpredictable errors in low voltage equipment. I've worked in arepairshop where the workbench wasn't grounded properly. I got a radio back three times after repair and never undersood why the damn thing returned after replacing the same chip.
Untill someone told me after some time the benches where never setup properly, go figure

[dbell84]

I only overclock if it makes a significant performance difference in the sim I want to play, otherwise my system stays at stock speeds.  I have an i5-2500k@3.30GHz.  It's made to be overclocked and I have run it at 4.0GHz with no problem.  Temps stay in acceptable ranges and it has good stability at that speed.  I see some people who overclock this same processor at speeds of 4.5GHZ or more, but I'm leery of trying to go that far. I don't overclock for GPL or rFactor 1 as I don't see any gains from doing so.  I do overclock my cpu for rFactor2 as it does make very significant performance gains in FPS when I do.  Thing is, I don't have the patience or the time to play rF2 very often because it's beta and always changing and I get tired of having to spend the time monkeying around with everything to get it to perform well. So I spend most of my sim time with GPL and rF1.

My current MSI 560GTX Ti graphic card comes overclocked compared to the standard 560GTX Ti and I haven't messed with overclocking it.

Dave

Edited by dbell84, Aug 27 2013 - 07:13 AM.

[jklhill]

It depends on your rig's components. Most modern systems will run GPL just fine. If we are talking an older system then it might be beneficial. I used to overclock just to get GPL playable. Now I don't need to, even thought my system is still outdated. I'm running and Opteron 180 with a Radeon X850XT on a DFI Lanparty ut NF4 Ultra-D motherboard with only 1 gig of ram and it runs GPL just fine at 36 or 60fps.

[TurboMan]

twinpotter, do you want to oveclock to get a better performance or just for fun/curiosity?

Reading the replies above, all are right so if you want to overclock just for fun, take an old computer that you don't mind to break and do all the experiments there. If you want better performance follow MECH's advice and try to save money for new components.

If you overclock something prepare to cool down cause things will be hot, very hot. I saw modders with a cascade of liquid nitrogen direcly to the CPU/GPU

[Stefan Roess]

On a side note.
If remember correctly. Overclocking caused problems in online racing GTL and I also think with GTR2. I had that problem on my old overclocked PC. Back then it had no influence on GPL.

Edited by Stefan Roess, Aug 27 2013 - 07:43 AM.

[twinpotter]

Hi TurboMan! It was just out of curiosity that I asked this question and was looking for general views.I have thought about overclocking many times but with the risk factor and not knowing fully what I am doing as steered the idea onto the back burner as well as the great advice and info from people on this thread Thanks all for your invaluable input!!!!Much obliged!

[sky]

TurboMan, on Aug 27 2013 - 05:29 AM, said:

If you overclock something prepare to cool down cause things will be hot, very hot. I saw modders with a cascade of liquid nitrogen direcly to the CPU/GPU

Been there, done that. However, we did not get to the liquid nitrogen bit. That is still on the todo list - it was meant for that Dothan mentioned above which passed away before it ever got to show its potential.
The good thing with recent CPUs is, depending on how you do it, that you can overclock them so they offer more power at full load, yet they still clock themselves down to next to nothing when idling.

Stefan, depending on how you have overclocked your machine it could have been a simple reason. With the first Intel and AMD pci-e based chipsets you could increase the basic busspeed - still one of the most common ways I believe. If you got to a certain point you would even change the PCI frequency from 33 mhz (or multiples thereof) to something else. PCI-e, I believe has a frequency of 100 mhz. My Dothan setup was built for a busspeed of 100 or 133 mhz (depending on the CPU) and a PCI-e frequency of 100 mhz. Since I had taken the busspeed up to 311 mhz I had to also increase the PCI-e frequency to 101 or 102 mhz in order for the machine to be stable, otherwise it would be extremely sluggish despite beating all benchmark highscores. Now with the PCI-e frequency out of synch timers could be off. And with those off, god knows what would happen to something that is expecting a fixed update rate of 100 mhz and instead getting more updates in the same time -> mismatch

[TurboMan]

sky, on Aug 27 2013 - 11:34 AM, said:

TurboMan, on Aug 27 2013 - 05:29 AM, said:

If you overclock something prepare to cool down cause things will be hot, very hot. I saw modders with a cascade of liquid nitrogen direcly to the CPU/GPU

Been there, done that. However, we did not get to the liquid nitrogen bit. That is still on the todo list - it was meant for that Dothan mentioned above which passed away before it ever got to show its potential.
The good thing with recent CPUs is, depending on how you do it, that you can overclock them so they offer more power at full load, yet they still clock themselves down to next to nothing when idling.
...

Good, i had no idea of that.

twinpotter, if it's only curiosity do what i told you. In case you got an old computer do some experiments, no fear (but don't push it to the limit, step by step). I have fun with all that techy stuff and maybe you too

[Wile E. Coyote]

I recently started overclocking cause my PC is really started to get old now and I thought I try to squeeze the most out of the cpu as it doesn't matter that much if I fry it as it was due for replacement probably a long time ago.
But like sky said it is like tuning a car and I found it actually more fun than I thought it would be, as it is I bought a better cpu cooler and a reliable psu as that are the most important things to have when going down that road.
My AMD Phenom 9550 2.2GHz now runs at 2.64GHz which is the max it would go, apparently I had a good mainboard which auto adjusts the voltages and I only needed to set the cpu clock speed and with the cooler it never gets hotter than 40°C even on hot days.
I had less good experiences with overclocking my videocard though and was more trouble than it was worth to me so I returned it to running stock speeds.
Also important is to turn of automatic clock speed programs in the bios like Intel Speedstep or AMD Cool'nquiet as these make the computer behave unreliable when overclocking.

[sky]

Wile... if you are aiming for the very top, then yes, I would agree that disabling Speedstep or CNQ is mandatory for the reasons you have given. However, for the sake of performance only when I need it and a considerably lower powerbill. i enjoy Speedstep, C1Q, Execute Halt and whatever other features the manufacturers offer. At idle my machine clocks down to 1.2ghz and 1.06v equallying about 20w. If I give it the beans, it will clock up to 3.8-3.9ghz (per default, 2-300 mhz "boost" as per the turbomode) at around 1.2v vcore - putting out around 105w, at 4.2ghz it is running 1.224v (still less than the default vcore this baby came with). So I'd rather give it an additional notch on the vcore than keep running it at full clocks full vcore all the time. I supposed this is better for the longevity of both the board and the cpu.
As for GPU overclock - I find it to be less rewarding and less fun than in the olden days where you would get pixel errors, white for memory issues, pink for GPU issues (on the radeons then anyway). If I need more power today, I just flip the switch an enable the 2nd card

[TurboMan]

Some months ago did some experiments about overclocking mobiles. I have a Nokia N86 and i wanted to use some emulators of videoconsoles just for fun (GBC, GBA, ...) but they were a bit slow. So installed a program that allowed me to change the CPU speed. 400Mhz (aprox. i remember about 444 but not sure) were set default but i had an option to increase it to 600Mhz (aprox. value also) and the behaviour of the mobile was great. The only problems i had were the logical problems, battery going on a few hours and the mobile a bit hotter. Apart from that, everything was ok.