What if there were no overclocking in this world?

[VirtualLarry]

What would you do, if overclocking wasn't possible? Would you spend the big dollars for the top-speed chip, or just console yourself that a top-end chip isn't in your future?

Likewise, what would you do, if overclocking were illegal? Would you still do it? Would underground "mod-shops" open up, catering to the illegal overclocking trade?

Granted, due to the way that they make and market chips, I don't see overclocking going away anytime soon. If anything, the past two or three years have made it more prominent. Witness ASRock's new 1156-socket boards with an easy 100% overclock switch.

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

I might try overclocking when my rig gets older but for now, it's very fast.

 

[yottabit]

Personally I would just continue going for middle-of-the-road technology, which is what I've been doing for a while. I'm a college student so I don't have money to shell out for top-end components, and building mid-range and then upgrading after a couple years seems to be the key value spot for me.

Unless a certain chip is really spectacular, I try not to build a system "planned" around an overclock (although I did that once with an Athlon 64 3000+) so as to not get my feelings hurt if I get a poorly binned chip, but think of the overclock as a nice surprise.

I find it hard to see overclocking made illegal but anything can happen. I'm sure people would still try to do it, much like people are still illegally modifying video game consoles, etc.

Honestly though think about it, even the best overclocks are only responsible for a fractional increase in processor performance. Even the best overclocked extreme processor from a couple years ago will quickly be obsoleted at most applications by a more modern mid-range processor, esp. as more and more cores come into play!

 

[CurseTheSky]

Well, components like motherboards wouldn't be such a diverse market as it is today. The primary differences would be features, such as better onboard audio, more PCI-E slots, power / reset buttons on board, etc. I doubt we'd see boards with dual / triple BIOS chips, or 12/16/24-phase power designs since there wouldn't be much point. We also wouldn't see much in the line of heatsinks, probably just a few advertised as being quieter than the stock Intel HSF. One market it would definitely kill is memory - everyone would just have value RAM.

With that said, I'd probably still have a similar build as I do today. I would have spent less on the motherboard and perhaps less on the memory, but that's about it.

 

[fffblackmage]

A world without overclocking would be a dark, dark, dark world. D=
I can't imagine gaming on my computer with my e6320 @ 1.86GHz... And that was a nice budget high-end chip about 3-4 years ago.

 

[A554SS1N]

I don't think it would change things much - people would still get what they personally consider as the best value chip, and one that they can afford.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I know they tell you not to do this, but I'm guity of buying chips with the express intent of overclocking, to a pre-defined level of performance. I bought my two E2140s with the intent of overclocking them to 2.8 or 3.2, and I bought my Q6600 with the intent to get it to 3.6. Thankfully, and perhaps I've been lucky, but I haven't been disappointed yet.

This would definately change if there were no overclocking. I would be looking at the mid-upper range of CPUs, rather than the bottom tier.

 

[tweakboy]

Then everyone here would have a crummy life, and possibly become suicidal. :biggrin:

 

[2March]

Most of the chips I had untill now have been bought with overclocking in mind. My 386, P90 and K6/2 weren't because I started off having no clue. But all others except the 1800+ were bought for OC'ing. Frankly I don't really care that people say you shouldn't buy procs for OC'ing. I did "it" with all of them

I'm not able to buy the topend hardware so I would have to do without it but it is a strange notion. I'm so used to having topend performance that I can't think how it would be without it. Maybe I wouldn't be tinkering with PC's that much. Who knows.

 

[TBSN]

CPU's are basically meant to "overclock."

They are sometimes the same over very similar chips, but sold at different "clocks" depending on how well that individual chip works. So sometimes a cheaper cpu can clock higher than it was sold as, but by nature cpu's are somewhat flexible...

Does that make sense, or am I totally off?

 

[spdfreak]

If there were no overclocking in this world, a fraction of 1% of the world's computers would run a little slower and a bunch of guys with OCD would have to find something else to spend their time and money on- like cars or motorcycles.

 

[dbcooper1]

CPU's are basically meant to "overclock."

They are sometimes the same over very similar chips, but sold at different "clocks" depending on how well that individual chip works. So sometimes a cheaper cpu can clock higher than it was sold as, but by nature cpu's are somewhat flexible...

Does that make sense, or am I totally off?

Within a line of CPUs, the manufacturer is either underclocking or overclocking the majority of them.

 

[TekDemon]

Well since I've overclocked every desktop CPU I've ever owned except for one (and that computer was for my parents and a super cheap OEM box) I think I'd have to go find a way to overclock anyway, even if it meant soldering in illegal clock generator chips.
I still remember feeling pretty awesome when I first got my P166 to run at 180Mhz (200Mhz wasn't stable on the horrible passive heatsink it had).

 

[crisium]

My old Phenom I gets very hot so I don't bother to OC it, heh.

Even i7 and i5 show very little performance gain from OCing in games. Encoding and such I'm sure, but for games not really.

So I'd have no problem.

 

[WildW]

My recent PC history has been based on Pentium Dual-Cores overclocked by 30 to 40% . . . so cheap, yet so fast. And yet, running at stock has very little drawback for gaming, which is what they get used for. GPUs never seem to "need" overclocking.

Gaming seems to be very accessible these days. . . I remember having to buy a new graphics card just to be able to play a new game without it chugging horribly. These days you can get away with so little even there. The CPU barely matters any more.

 

[n7]

I'd still be buying likely exactly the same CPUs as i do now.

Wouldn't change anything for me really.

 

[73chev]

I'd be buying the same CPU's.
Mobo's, ram, and cooling solutions would be a different story.

 

[BD231]

memory dump

Overclocking used to suck for the most part, you could barely squeeze anything out of a PIII or lower and the gains were not noticeable. There weren't any fancy BIOS option's either, if you wanted to OC you were stuck playing with jumper settings. That was pretty fun though ... jumper settings for the CPU faded when we started surpasing 500mhz.

Then the K7 hit and everyone broke out their soldering irons to play connect the dots .... I don't solder. Intel had no way to match the FPU performance at the time and instead competed through fooling people via mhz (the P4).

I do remember hating intel because I could never afford their top teir PIII chip, it was around forever but at 12 or 13 years old it just wasn't plausable working with my allowance. My k6-2+ and k6-3+ treated me well though, I got at least 100mhz oc's out of both those chips. If I remember correctly, compaq was still selling K6-2/3 machines that had jumpers for overclocking available. Even some of the K7 boards had CPU jumpers.

Once the P4/k7 hit overclocking took off IMO. Who'd of thought intel's clockspeed war would harbour such change! The gains we see today were nowhere to be seen in the 90's, at least not anywhere near the 30, 40 or even 50 % gains we get today.

With the amount of options we have in CPU's these days, locking chips is not such a big deal anymore. I'm sure someone would find a workaround.

 

[2March]

memory dump

Overclocking used to suck for the most part, you could barely squeeze anything out of a PIII or lower and the gains were not noticeable.

Just for the record: the PIII was one of the best overclockers in history provided you had a Coppermine, and no jumpers needed for OC'ing (CUSL-2).

PIII-600E @ 952MHz... There was something wrong with early Coppermines that made the BIOS reset when pulling the the power on the box. I think the Vcore was reset and then the overclock would fail. I remember starting up games at 600MHz wondering why the heck they ran so bad

 

[dguy6789]

I'd buy low to mid end chips of the newest generation of processor when I build a new PC.

Back when the Athlon XP first came out, you could have a fast PC just by putting an Athlon XP 1500+ or 1600+ in there. An Athlon 64 2800+ or 3000+ would run any game easily when they came out. A Core 2 Duo E6300 could do it too. It doesn't seem to have changed with the i7 920 and lowest end i5 processors.

 

[TJCS]

If there were no overclocking in this world, then there would be no way for Intel to test the stability of their CPUs.

 

[BD231]

Just for the record: the PIII was one of the best overclockers in history provided you had a Coppermine, and no jumpers needed for OC'ing (CUSL-2).

PIII-600E @ 952MHz... There was something wrong with early Coppermines that made the BIOS reset when pulling the the power on the box. I think the Vcore was reset and then the overclock would fail. I remember starting up games at 600MHz wondering why the heck they ran so bad

Haha, yes the coppermine I do remember that chip! Was the 600e Slot or socket? Glad to hear SOMEONE was having fun , the PIII had a great run.

 

[yottabit]

Haha, yes the coppermine I do remember that chip! Was the 600e Slot or socket? Glad to hear SOMEONE was having fun , the PIII had a great run.

Don't forget the celeron!

 

[aamsel]

Don't forget the celeron!

Exactly.
The Celeron 300a was a cinch to run at 450MHz.
I had an ABIT board that was unique at the time (and even now) because
it was a non-server board that ran two CPU's. Droppped in two Celeron 300a's,
and set each to 450 and done. Instant 50% overclock.

 

[nyker96]

then maybe we'll finally have world peace ... can we all get along without oc?