Over clocking?

[MADe]

Over Clocking, OC'ing

All pc hardware pieces run at a specified frequency and voltage. All designed and spec'ed by the manufacturer. This hardware can be altered from its design specs by increasing the frequency and voltage. You can Over clock and down clock. The higher the frequency, the faster code gets executed, the more power consumed.

Why OC,
1) older hardware
2)enthusiast, usually leads to great OC's but no practical use. ie: pc is for that high OC number for glory but pc will not really run without BSOD's.
3) your poor, you buy lower end hardware with intent on getting higher end performance. ie: I bought a $286 cpu, I get $1000+ cpu performance by OC'ing.

Todays world, you want 4GHz+ cpu's, GPU's with lots of vram, double digit ram MHz. Look at the specs of a gaming system you would buy if you had money to burn, then see what you could build it for yourself. If you add OC'ing into it from start, you save some dollars. But only if your willing to risk.

[38ruk]

I've had a 3570K (3.3 ghz base clock)  overclocked to 4.5 ghz since 2012. As long as you keep it cool (im on water)  your not going to shorten the life span enough to notice. Sure it might only last 7 yrs and not 10 yrs but who really keeps a cpu that long before upgrading?

One other thing , some of the I5-I7's can do 4.4-4.5 ghz without even raising the Vcore , if your lucky enough to have one of those, your cpu's longevity is far less effected than some that have to add a ton of voltage to get stable at those speeds .

[Gman]

IMO a lot of the "K/unlocked" CPUs that Intel has been releasing in recent years are essentially expected to be overclocked by the manufacturers.  Same with GPUs - they all release software programs in order to facilitate overclocking, and nearly every bios on any "gaming" or "enthusiast" type of motherboard has all kinds of overclocking options, and many of them have automatic or "AI" one click options to "safely" overclock your CPU to a reasonable level.  Even their advertising, and testing protocols often focus on overclockability. 

I agree with the above, you may take a few years, and only possibly, off of a CPU if you properly cool it and don't go crazy with the voltage and keep the heat monitored and in check, but in the grand scheme of things you'll likely have upgraded twice by the time any longevity forfeiture could become an issue. 

That 3570k CPU was the overclocker of its day a few years back, very, very popular chip.  Lots of em out there similar to it available now too.  The new Skylake stuff by all accounts is clocking up pretty well.  Our oldest system, a locked x79 3820 overclocked to 4.5 GHZ for over 3 years now, and it's only been powered off for maybe 2 hours total in that time, just to plunk in some video upgrades a couple of times, and that's on a 60$ Noctua air cooler too.

It certainly isn't necessary, especially with the power you can buy with not a lot of $ these days, but if you want that extra 10 or 15% (in terms of real world gaming performance increase), you are unlikely to harm anything if you educate yourself, or ask for help, or perhaps do both, before you try it.


Anyone remember the old Celeron 300a?  Back when the P2 450 was "the" heavy hitter, along came this little wonder chip, the Celeron 300a, of which nearly all of them could have the snot overclocked out of them right up to 450mhz, at 1/2 the price or even less than the flagship chip.  Back in the old Rainbow 6 and Warbirds 2.xx days for me, and I bought one as our 2nd gaming PC, and wished I hadn't spent all that extra $ on the P2 450 first, the Celery worked so well.  I think it was probably the first commonly overclocked CPU in the PC gaming world 16+ years ago now.

[38ruk]

Anyone remember the old Celeron 300a?  Back when the P2 450 was "the" heavy hitter, along came this little wonder chip, the Celeron 300a, of which nearly all of them could have the snot overclocked out of them right up to 450mhz, at 1/2 the price or even less than the flagship chip.  Back in the old Rainbow 6 and Warbirds 2.xx days for me, and I bought one as our 2nd gaming PC, and wished I hadn't spent all that extra $ on the P2 450 first, the Celery worked so well.  I think it was probably the first commonly overclocked CPU in the PC gaming world 16+ years ago now.

Yep , I remember the old celerons . I was running a prebuilt back in those days before i really got into the enthusiast bracket.  Some of my best overclockers were a 2500+ barton that ran at 2.3GHZ .... it outlasted the mother board lol. The other best besides my I5 was an amd Phenom II 550 BE dual core. I was able to unlock 2 disabled cores to make it a quad and get to 4ghz on an overclock up from 3.1ghz hehe. I gave that away after 3yrs to a relative and it's still running to this day .

[bustr]

Before over clocking a Graphics card for the alpha\AH3 if you have a lower range graphics card. Look up some important numbers first.

RAM DDR3 or GDDR5
Band Width
Data Paths
Number of Shaders

If your card has 800 or less Shaders, BW 80 or less, over clocking enough to see some difference in the game will result in very high GPU temps with a very small increase in band width. Even with increased cooling, you may still hit shut downs with the card. And DDR3 RAM is just slow...

Turning off post lighting and playing in 1024 Mode will give better results or, see if you can install a better Graphics card even if it is a slight improvement over your current. Higher end graphics cards really won't need OCing for the alpha\AH3. They are higher end and more expensive for a reason.

A card in this range will probably not need OCing.

RAM GDDR5 1-2G
Band Width 128G byte\sec or higher
Data Paths 128bit or higher
Shaders - more than 800

If I remember correctly, Hitech is building the game with a GTX 660, and I've never seen him communicate he OC's his work gear.

RAM GDDR5
Band Width 144.2 GB\s
Data Paths 192bit
Shaders 960

Now if this is OCing for other games, some games respond better to that than others including which brand of graphics card you are using.

[Skuzzy]

It is a stock NVidia GTX660 with 2GB of video RAM.