that single review was a failed. was gpu limited. that is why gulftown vs haswell show zero difference.
try that same setup with titan quad sli. guarantee the results will be different.
"The guy" is a key phrase there, meaning exactly 1 person. There are a lot of other individuals who would notice. I'd say most PC gamers could easily appreciate the 33% improvement. Yes, there is a point where more performance doesn't really do much. 33% from Gulftown to Haswell in BF3 is far from being it IMO.
My experience is the opposite. I've actually tested myself, and a couple friends a few years ago when we were playing Battlefield:Vietnam, and we all couldn't really tell a difference until minimum FPS was near 30. We'd have FRAPS running and make a mental note of when we noticed something and go back and look at FRAPS. For nobody was that above 40.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask for something more solid than one dude telling me there are "a lot" of people who can tell.
BS.
What there are "a lot" of are people who talk on the internet like they can tell... I mean, they have to justify their spending on hardware. Or think they can, but have never actually tested themselves.
Have you actually tested your capability the way this guy did? I have. I had a matrix of under / over clocked CPU and GPU and had someone else make the settings changes so I wouldn't know what was what. I could only tell in specific portions of certain maps where frame rates really tanked. I definitely could not tell a difference between 60 and 80.
It wasn't enough in 2007 either. In the Barton core AthlonXP days, I had an OC that would pass 24 hours of Prime95, Small FFT / Large FFT... didn't matter, It would pass it. But if I launched a certain application I would reliably blue screen in less than 1 minute. I forget what that application was... I think it was a game.
I don't remember if I stabilized it with voltage or lower clocks. Doesn't really matter, the point is that Prime95 was never enough on it's own. That experience is when I started backing off clock by 5% at same voltage from wherever my stress tests were stable.
Agreed, on it's own, it was never enough, nor was any one application. It was also never "quick" even when I was stress testing single core Socket A Athlons, a 24hr run was the recommended norm.
And was there any noticed game improvements because of the over clock, IE frame rate etc? The OP seems to be asking that question indirectly, someone else posted the answer anything over 4.6 the gains fall off quickly.
Clearly you have your own biases so what I say doesn't matter. One guy said he couldn't tell the difference, that was gospel. One guy saying many can tell the difference is BS to you... That there tells the whole story and there's no need to go further with the discussion.
So, can your overclocked Ivy (or Sandy) cpu have these engines battle it out without bsod's, error messages or whea errors? How about when you're doing some heavy duty browsing in the meantime? Or maybe you have yet a different way of testing for stability?
Just thought i would add after many hours of messing around with arena(lots of WHEA errors btw coffee), and lots of encoding i seem to be stable at 0.120v offset 1.320 cpuz.
Prime95 and Aida64 did it for me. Prime95 was the hardest and would reliably crash after ~3 hours, where as Aida64 and games were stable. Of course you're also keeping an eye out for unexpected crashes and especially reboots or BSODs during the first couple of weeks or even months after an OC. If it was 24-hour "Prime95 stable", it means it just takes a small tweak to get it stable, should it crash in some other game/app.
Then there are those who simply ignore tests like Prime95 Small FFT's or Aida64 FPU-only because their temps are too high (since they can easily be 20C higher than games), then call it a stable overclock... A stable overclock should be able to handle anything, for any amount of time.