No longer motivated to OC

[LoneNinja]

I overclock and underclock every one of my processors, I quit messing with ram/video cards because I don't see much benefit from them. Start my computer up with it overclocked in the BIOS, than K10stat opens and I manually set my down clocked state. I rarely even run at default speed, but the extra performance is nice occasionally when I need to get something rendered in 3ds max or something else.

 

[RussianSensation]

The only problem with this strategy is that you end up paying for a $70 cooler which defeats the cost savings of the cheaper CPU.

You forgot the part where the bundled Core i7 860 cooler results in 85*C temperatures at load at stock speeds and 95*C when TurboMode is on. Add to the fact the loud noise it makes while doing it, and you are buying some kind of an aftermarket cooler anyway if you care about good temperatures and an a lot quieter system.

Alternatively, you can get a Core i5 750 for $200 and get a $30 CM212+ which will let you overclock to 4.0ghz. This would be faster than any CPU currently sold outside of special applications that benefit from a Core i7 980X and its 12 threads.

By upgrading to an aftermarket tower cooler, the power circuitry temperatures of your motherboard will also fall (mine fell from 70*C with the stock cooler to 42*C). Now it's looking like I have to spend $30-$50 to go from 2.66 ghz to 4.0ghz, resulting in lower case temperatures, lower motherboard temperatures and while getting a quieter system too. Suddenly an aftermarket cooler sounds like a bargain! Not to mention a 4.0ghz Core i5 system will probably last 1 full year longer than a stock Core i5 750 system (so more $$$ saved on upgrading later, giving new tech time to come out, or for prices to drop).

I think the argument for using a stock AMD cooler makes more sense. Ever since I can remember, Intel bundled coolers are metal paperweights -- too loud, unable to keep a cpu cool at stock (load), and a horrible pushpin installation process that results in frustration!

 

[ShawnD1]

You forgot the part where a stock Core i7 860 cooler results in 85*C temperatures at load

D:


Does it really run at that temperature? All of my computers use stock coolers and none of them are that high.
E6600 overclocked 30% - 75C in prime95 small FFT
Phenom X6 1055 overclocked 30% - 60C in prime
Phenom X2 550 overclocked 20% - 60C in prime
Athlon X4 620 overclocked 25% - 65C in prime
Phenom X4 9600 overclocked 9% - 60C in prime

If it does run at that temperature, it might not be a big deal. My GeForce 8800 video card runs at a constant 86C while doing folding calculations and the thing still works after 2 years.

 

[richierich1212]

D:


Does it really run at that temperature? All of my computers use stock coolers and none of them are that high.
E6600 overclocked 30% - 75C in prime95 small FFT
Phenom X6 1055 overclocked 30% - 60C in prime
Phenom X2 550 overclocked 20% - 60C in prime
Athlon X4 620 overclocked 25% - 65C in prime
Phenom X4 9600 overclocked 9% - 60C in prime

If it does run at that temperature, it might not be a big deal. My GeForce 8800 video card runs at a constant 86C while doing folding calculations and the thing still works after 2 years.

I'm sure the bundled cooler can cool the E6600 fine; Intel i7 quads not so much.

 

[extra]

D:


Does it really run at that temperature? All of my computers use stock coolers and none of them are that high.

Yeah, it's really that bad.
The reason yours mostly aren't that bad is because the AMD stock coolers, especially the x6 ones and such are nice. The x6 stock cooler is a nice one with heat pipes. The intel one is just a paper weight. Actually, not even that, they don't weigh anything.

 

[sxr7171]

I'm starting to feel like the OP but also it's just changing one number on a modern MB and you get 25-35% extra free performance with the stock cooler.

 

[flexy]

I tend to think that OC is "silly" but only when it comes to GPUs. The recent years, my graphics cards OC are really nothing more than idiocy since 700 <--> 750mhz or whatever 4&#37;-5% "increase" on a GPU HARDLY translates into real noticeable gains. GPUs currently always seem to be very much on the egde already.

BUT..my current (and already quite old) system is a Intel Q6600 with the best OC ON AIR i personally ever had - overclocked far better than the many of AMD CPUs i had before.

Original Speed 2.4Gzhz, overclocked to 3.6Ghz....PLUS bus frequency oced from 260 to 440 which is 65% PLUS oc-ed memory.

Which i consider a SIGNIFICANT oc compared to the AMD days where you hardly could OC like 15%.

The result is also that (up to today) i did not see the need to upgrade my CPU/Mobo since my old quad code at 3.6 STILL eats anything i throw at it From that point of view there is a direct benefit of such an overclock.

has OCing become something of the past?

I don't think so...as long as there are CPUs and (bus)systems which would yield such 47%++ increase simply by going into the bios with a little knowledge. (Remember, there were times where you had to use jumpers for such experiments where it was way more a hassle... )

Furthermore...its also a passion/hobby thing to do which i enjoy.

But, as said above, i totally agree with that it has become very silly with GPUs.

 

[flexy]

I'm starting to feel like the OP but also it's just changing one number on a modern MB and you get 25-35&#37; extra free performance with the stock cooler.

I personally say that good/significant overclocking is EXTREMELY involved and far more than changing one single value.

I could refer to forum posts and sites where you COULD study several months ONLY for learning about the meaningof ONE SINGLE bios settings, like "CPU GTL" Ref Voltage"...i am not even kidding.

Basically, yes, it has become much easier to overclock nowadays, but it CAN also be extremely complex and involved.

It is actually rather un-likely that with changing one single value (say "FSB") you would *not* have to adjust another value. Clock frequency is directly related to voltage required, and so on...and higher cooling requirements as a result also..

Eg...its like you may very well put a porsche motor in some cr@p pinto...but you might quickly come to the conclusion that you need to do more things to it to make it a race car.

 

[Termie]

Yeah, it's really that bad.
The reason yours mostly aren't that bad is because the AMD stock coolers, especially the x6 ones and such are nice. The x6 stock cooler is a nice one with heat pipes. The intel one is just a paper weight. Actually, not even that, they don't weigh anything.

Yup - Intel has been shrinking its heatsinks as it shrinks its production processes. An old e6600 heatsink I had in my closet was so nice and hefty that I used it on my e8400 and tossed the e8400's stock heatsink. And I won't even start on the i7-860's wimpy heatsink. It's definitely not worth using.

 

[Grooveriding]

Still overclock everything here. But take the lazy route by buying hardware I know will make it painless.

I don't stress/test for the max possible anymore either. I prefer laying off lots of extra voltage to get max overclocks in preference of temps being reasonable and not worrying about my hardware.

I don't ever give my gpus extra voltage anymore, just the cpu.

 

[ShawnD1]

I tend to think that OC is "silly" but only when it comes to GPUs. The recent years, my graphics cards OC are really nothing more than idiocy since 700 <--> 750mhz or whatever 4&#37;-5% "increase" on a GPU HARDLY translates into real noticeable gains. GPUs currently always seem to be very much on the egde already.

Indeed, overclocking it 20% doesn't seem like a big change since the cards advance so much so quickly. It seems like they get twice as fast every 6 months. While an i7 is maybe 20x faster than an Atom processor, a $400 video card is literally 100x faster than a $30 card. One has 10 processing units and the other has 400 that all run at a higher clock speed, there's no possible way to clear the gap by straight overclocking. With a desktop CPU, Xbit did an article where they overclocked a dual core E1200 or something like that and it actually matched the performance of a $1000 X6850 or whatever the top of the line dual core was. Try doing that with a video card. Overclock a $100 video card so it runs as fast as a $1000 video card. Good luck!

Yup - Intel has been shrinking its heatsinks as it shrinks its production processes. An old e6600 heatsink I had in my closet was so nice and hefty that I used it on my e8400

The retail heatsink for my E6600 is a pile of shit. It looks like this:

 

[ehume]

Looks more like a pile of aluminium than a pile of defecation.

 

[james1701]

Not all heat sinks get shrunk, some got a dose of viagra.

 

[adamantinepiggy]

Hehe, I'm glad I'm not the only one who has gotten lazy with overclocking. My main is a i980X hex-core, Prolimatech Megahalems, x58 ASRock Extreme, 12GB Crucial RAM, 256GB Crucial C300 (boot and app drive), 2-TByte F3's, EVGA 295GTX, 1000watt something-or-other PSU. When I first assembled it, I jumped straight into OC'ing it to around 4GHz and from the limited (12 hours or so) of testing, it seemed stable.

Then my weekend ended, and since I hadn't completed any real stability testing, I dropped it back to stock, and have noticed it is absolutely fast enough for everything I do even at lower speeds, the only thing I might be limited by is the GPU, but since I dont have time to play games anymore, even that's not a big deal..

What I do now is just bump the turbo multiplier to 27 on every core (normally limited to a 27 on only 1 or 2 cores and the rest max at 26), and call it a day. I have had 0 issues with the stock voltage settings at 3.6Ghz, which it will max all cores to the 27 multiple if I run something like Prime95, but for normal usage, it just spikes a core or two for a fraction of a sec. Hell for most stuff, it never even bothers to get out of the lowest speedstep multiplier it's so overkill.

Even worse now, is the fact I spend most of my time now on the wife's media PC (i5-650, 8gig, 256G SSD drive) that is actually undervolted and running at stock speeds. Mainly because her PC is in the living room (convenient access), while mine is hidden in the basement (them stairs are a bitch when I get off work and am feeling tired/lazy). As her PC also has a SSD, it "feels" no slower really than my main that I don't use near as much anymore..

One day I might get back to see what I can actually pull out of the i980X, but in all honesty, it would be an intellectual exercise only, as I have been plenty happy with a 3.6Ghz 27-multiple "turbo" mode, that required no messing around with really to get to work and all power saving stuff works fine too.

FYI: on the wife's i5 PC, I modified an old model (copper core) 775 Intel heatsink to use on the i5 as the stock i5 coller was much smaller and had no big middle copper core insert. Works great on her undervolted system. The stock i5 and low-end i7 heat sinks are a joke, even compared to earlier incarnations of the Intel heat sink..

 

[RussianSensation]

D:

Does it really run at that temperature?

Yes. Intel Stock Cooler - Core i7 860 @ 2.8ghz + Turbo Mode

vs. Prolimatech Megahalems + 1 120mm fan 1600 rpm - Core i7 @ 3.9ghz

 

[deimos3428]

I like to do a quick overclock with a new CPU just to see what it can do.

For actual use I tend to run at stock (or a minor undervolt) instead. The minor speed increase just isn't worth dealing with the increased heat, noise, instability and power consumption.

 

[ShawnD1]

I like to do a quick overclock with a new CPU just to see what it can do.

For actual use I tend to run at stock (or a minor undervolt) instead. The minor speed increase just isn't worth dealing with the increased heat, noise, instability and power consumption.

Minor increase? Many processors can overclock by 30% using stock cooling and a budget motherboard (my E6600). With good parts, they'll overclock upward of 60% (Anand's review of E6600). With a bit of effort and a hardcore cooler, Xbit was able to get a cheap E1200 celeron to run neck and neck against Intel's flagship E6750.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/celeron-e1200_7.html#sect1

It's also worth noting that overclocking has almost no effect on idle power consumption. My Phenom 1055 is overclocked to 3.7ghz, but it idles at 1.0ghz. Voltage drops as well. Power consumption when it's doing something requiring power (ie games) is really high, but the rest of the time it's really low. I can do a quick test to tell you how much the power consumption changes when going from idle to prime95 on all cores
idle - 253 system watts (includes monitor and GPU folding)
prime95 - 421 system watts
difference between idle and prime95 - 168W

So it's not like it's consuming incredibly high power even when doing nothing. It only chews through power when doing something. If you're just reading anandtech and watching porn, power consumption will be about the same. When you get into video encoding, the overclocking starts to show itself.

 

[deimos3428]

Minor increase? Many processors can overclock by 30% using stock cooling and a budget motherboard (my E6600).

Yes, and that's a minor increase. It's not like you can make your computer run 2x, 5x, 10x faster. It's a hobby, something you do for fun -- not to actually save any time.

 

[ShawnD1]

Yes, and that's a minor increase. It's not like you can make your computer run 2x, 5x, 10x faster. It's a hobby, something you do for fun -- not to actually save any time.

It took 4 years to see processors increase in speed by 320% (link). E6750 was 4 years ago, i7 980 is right now, performance difference is in the ballpark of 300-400% in every test that is multithreaded. 30% increase from doing 2 hours of work is quite good.

 

[Jhatfie]

I used to OC with the intent of getting every last Mhz and watercooled everything, performed volt mods, modded my cases, etc. But it all became a laborious task as my available free time dwindled. Now I still overclock, as the performance increase is almost always tangible, however I usually set a respectable goal, achieve it and then leave it at that.

Like my i5-750, I set my goal of 4Ghz, hit it with 100% stability and stopped overclocking. Will it do more? Maybe, but I lack the motivation and time to test and test and test for another 100mhz or two.

 

[deimos3428]

It took 4 years to see processors increase in speed by 320% (link). E6750 was 4 years ago, i7 980 is right now, performance difference is in the ballpark of 300-400% in every test that is multithreaded. 30% increase from doing 2 hours of work is quite good.

The point is that overclocking is not "work", it's a hobby. If you don't enjoy it as such, it's really not worth doing.

For example, I can get maybe 3.7Ghz out of my PhII 955 with a weekend running (failing) stability tests. (I think that's a far more typical scenario than the numbers you've been quoting.) Is an extra 15% performance worth it? Well, maybe...but I doubt you're ever going to make up that many CPU cycles over the life of the machine.

But then assume I also want it to be as cool, quiet and stable as it was originally. Take all of the time, money, and effort to get back on par with a stock-clocked system by those measures and it's not even close to worthwhile. I could just put in some overtime that weekend and buy a better CPU.

 

[bryanW1995]

Most programs were hard drive limited. I was using a 350MHz Pentium 2 with Windows XP as late as 2004 and the slowest part of the computer was still the hard drive. It could stream files across the network at 30mb/s, it could run Microsoft Office XP, it could run any web content that did not involve flash, and it would play movies that were encoded as mpeg2 (avi takes too much cpu power).
One characteristic I remember as clear as day is how terrible the computer sounded. That grinding noise was the hard drive.
My friend's Athlon 2800+ system is about the same speed as my Pentium 2 because it has hard drives from roughly the same era (I upgraded the hard drives as they got bigger). Windows still takes forever to boot, Firefox makes the hdd light stay on all the time, grinding noise, etc. It's all hard drive limited. The only real difference between my Pentium 2 and my friend's Athlon is that one can play youtube videos and one cannot.

Today we see the exact same thing. Most programs are hard drive limited, but some are not. Some of the first Phenom quad cores had slow enough single-core performance that they cannot play blu-ray movies. Flash is so terribly made that even i7 systems were having trouble with it; Anand had an entire article about how GPU powered flash was going to make it not suck so bad. Most programs that are not games, not flash, not 1080p are still hard drive limited.

you know, we overclock our cpu, our gpu, our pci-e, our nb, our sb...why can't we oc our hd's??? I mean, I love my ssd, but if I could oc it just a bit it would be x % better, right?

 

[bryanW1995]

Yes. Intel Stock Cooler - Core i7 860 @ 2.8ghz + Turbo Mode

vs. Prolimatech Megahalems + 1 120mm fan 1600 rpm - Core i7 @ 3.9ghz

zoiks scooby! how much of a temperature bump does someone with HT typically get? what do you get running the modified seti apps?

 

[DrMrLordX]

you know, we overclock our cpu, our gpu, our pci-e, our nb, our sb...why can't we oc our hd's??? I mean, I love my ssd, but if I could oc it just a bit it would be x % better, right?

You could probably overclock the controller, if the firmware would support it and if someone would provide a usable interface.

 

[ShawnD1]

You could probably overclock the controller, if the firmware would support it and if someone would provide a usable interface.

Could probably make a hard drive spin faster and still work. The catch is that it might break a lot faster if the drive is not balanced enough to run at 10k rpm. The ones that actually run at 10k and still work are extremely expensive - it's hard to make something with that level of precision.