Well, I tend to see things like Aigo and VirtualLarry.
I sort of took umbrage at someone's remark that the manufacturers should "lock" their product so you can't "adjust" it. And I see this -- like Larry -- as a "journey" of adjustment -- not a destination.
I'm still in the "planning" stage to grab an i7-2600K. I don't "need" it -- I just "want" it. And it's not much good to me unless I can tweak it.
I've got three OC'd systems sitting here. An old Q6600 @ 3.0 Ghz -- a modest over-clock; a slightly less aged E8600 @ 4.1 (but it was at 4.25 once); my brother's P4 3.4Ghz @ 3.8.
Why is Bro's system here? It's here because he didn't do proper system maintenance, and there were some corrupted OS files -- specifically the graphics driver. HE thought it was a HARDWARE problem -- possibly "premature" death due to an over-clock setting which anyone here would say is "sissy." Even so -- I have to admit, having given him the P4 back in 2007 four years ago -- that old P4 "gits up and goes" for "regular" computing. So . . . I had to repair the OS, save his files, make him feel good.
The old Kentsfield has been running at that 3.0 speed for almost four years now. Shows no signs of going south. Nor does the E8600.
And -- like Aigo said, like others said -- "We who are about to die -- throw away our fortunes on PC parts as we salute overclocking." Or, like the silly housewife in the outlet mall commercial said while holding up a pair of $500 boots and a $4,000 mink-stole: "I saved 40%. . . . I saved 60% . . . I saved 100%!!!"
In that vein, I've ordered and paid for parts, become distracted with something else, changed my mind about something, and stowed them away.
My friend -- who "uses" PC's but made a point to say "I don't BUILD them" -- just got an Dell XPS 7100 (Phenom II x6 1055T), and spent a Grand on the hardware, warranty and service plan. He got -- and gets -- what he paid for. He's a "mainstream user." He's not going to go through the nettle-patch of troubleshooting hardware or managing ten different warranties. That's something I CHOOSE to do.
I'll probably spend $1,400 on building my next system, and I'll take three months to tweak it. In the meantime, my friend had told me the XPS came bundled with 8GB of DDR3, and he was "impressed" with 64-bit OS, even as some have told me they were "irritated" at Win 7. I'm still using VISTA, but it's VISTA-64. That's a dimension of speed improvement that doesn't require OC'ing.
But I was thinking about how my Q6600 eventually gets choked up using 67% of the 4GB. I was thinking about how freaking fast my E8600 runs. And I discovered that the 2x4GB DDR2 RAM kits are still available, having thought they'd long since gone off the reseller radar. ANd -- being an OC purist -- I was thinking I didn't want to fill all four slots, that I'd rather purchase a new kit for $170 than fill the remaining slots for $80.
But in this economy, I've discovered I LIKE holding onto money. The old LGA 775 . . . why spend money on old tech, when I could just bide my time building the Sandy Bridge (or whatever . . . ?) And then -- I remembered. "I saved 100%!!!" I'd bought and put back a spare RAM kit -- not the same "model" as the kit already in the E8600, but the same manufacturer -- with specs pretty much the same.
Could I change all the RAM BIOS settings except the voltage, drop the over-clock by a 150 Mhz for a margin of safety, and put in the new kit -- toward only mild tweaks to put things "back in order?" Yup!
And I was stunned. I'll have to learn to fly my FA-22 all over again. I had to recalibrate my joy-stick. That little old Wolfdale is lightning fast -- and so much faster than it was at the same 4+ Ghz speed.
Do you freaking think . . . . I want the manufacturers . . . to just cater to "mainstream users" and marginalize me from all this FREE excitement by making it impossible to tweak my hard-earned hardware? "They'll never take our FREEE-DOM!!" as Mel Gibson's "Wallace" character said . . . . .