Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
If you can afford to buy a system that is fast enough for you at stock speed, I recommend it. It's a lot less work to have a reliable, stable system if you run everything at 100% stock speed and do no tweaking.
^ Wise words.
For some of us, mild overclocking can help stretch the performance of one generation of hardware out a little longer, and delay having to upgrade. It's kind of like, when you're running out of shampoo, so you take what's left in the bottle, and add some water to it and mix it in, and what's left will last longer, so you don't have to buy more shampoo immediately. But at the same time, it may not clean as "stably" as full-strength ("stock specification") shampoo. Ok, not the greatest analogy. But that's sort of the thinking behind OC'ing to save money.
It exploits one of the biggest "secrets" of the computer/eletronics industry - that a large part of the market differentiation between products, is completely artificial, and the products all come off of the same assembly line.
It's like buying a Toyota, and putting a Lexus nameplate on it.
Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
Sometimes you can think everything is fine with your overclock, then you start running some new game and get "mysterious" crashes or are not even able to install it. Dealing with quirks like that can be worth it if you're on a tight budget, but I'd rather spend time playing a game than playing "fix the crash."
Overclocking and keeping stable, requires a certain amount of experience, just like tuning the engine computer of a car, you don't want to adjust the air/fuel mixtures and acceleration points, without knowing what you are doing, because you could end up blowing the engine. There are a minority of inexperienced overclockers that buy new parts, intending to overclock right out-of-the-box, and end up frying their CPU chips or something. Don't do that. If you don't know or understand, don't overclock. Read up and study and understand first.