Hey Lephturn, Overclocking?

[FOGOLD]

Hey Lephturn, you are THE man when it comes to hardware etc and your advice has been great .

What I want to know is, what about all this overclocking malarkey?  Is it really worth it? Everyone knows you have to nearly double processor speed to get an improvement in frame rate. It seems to me people do it just because they can and they only gain 20-30 Mhz at the end of the day. maybe graphics cards are a better bet.

I recently went from a PIII600 Geforce2 GTS 256 Mb setup (Win95) to a Geforce3 Ti500 512Mb 1800XP rig (Win XP) and now get 75FPS in the tower as opposed to 52 in the old system (at lower res, sure). This is a fair old increase in FPS, but hell, its a fair old hike in horsepower! It should be an improvement.

I can't beleive even a 50Mhz increase in processor speed is going to make diddley squat difference to performance.

[Camel]

Im not Lephturn, but take your old 600 for example. It is possible to squeeze alittle more life out of the CPU and video with some O/C'ing. 50-100mhz to a 600 is a nice little boost. Its not just the CPU, your RAM, PCI ports, and AGP ports also increase their bus speed when adjusting your FSB. In some cases like with your RAM, its a good thing, and some times a card like a Gf3 may not like the AGP bus to far out of spec, and will limit how far you can go.

Ive O/C'ed just about every system Ive had, some because I need some extra preformance and others for fun. I certainly have no need to O/C this curent machine, but I am by 738mhz. Thats a bit more than the 50mhz you suggested. Again this is just for fun, and its not needed. You do indeed have the possiblity of shortening the life of many components running them out of spec, but so far thats has not been a problem for me. I tend to upgrade often enough that the lifespan isnt a factor. I think I just get a kick out of running something faster than its rated or stock speed.

WinXp
Skyhawk Alluminum case
P4 1.8a(Northwood) @ 2538mhz
Asus P4S333 mb
Kingmax DDR333 @352.5
Gainward Gf3 ti200 @ 225/515

[FOGOLD]

Fair enough:D

[214thCavalier]

Edited copy from the 3dmark 2000 thread.

Gonna post 3 CPU speeds so apologies long post, the cpu is an XP1500 which i have modified to unlock the multiplier, so far it runs at XP1900 speeds with standard fsb of 133 so no cooking of ancillary equipment at standard cpu voltage of 1.75 V.

No Vid card oc.  XP1500

DISPLAY
Platform ASUS V8200 Series v21.81a
CPU Optimization D3D Pure Hardware T&L
Width 1024
Height 768
Depth 32 bit
Z-Buffering 24 bit
Texture Format Compressed
Buffering Double
Refresh Rate Default
FSAA Mode None

OPTIONS
Show Title Screens Yes
Continuous Benchmark No
Benchmark Run Count 1
Demo Sounds Enabled Yes
Continuous Demo No
Game Sound Effects Enabled Yes
Game Music Enabled Yes
Game Detail Level Low

RESULTS
3DMark Score 7409
Game 1 - Car Chase - Low Detail 117.7 fps
Game 1 - Car Chase - High Detail 40.1 fps
Game 2 - Dragothic - Low Detail 118.7 fps
Game 2 - Dragothic - High Detail 62.4 fps
Game 3 - Lobby - Low Detail 114.7 fps
Game 3 - Lobby - High Detail 54.1 fps
Game 4 - Nature 38.4 fps
Fill Rate (Single-Texturing) 845.1 MTexels/s
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing) 1670.2 MTexels/s
High Polygon Count (1 Light) 20.4 MTriangles/s
High Polygon Count (8 Lights) 4.1 MTriangles/s
Environment Bump Mapping 125.2 fps
DOT3 Bump Mapping 125.3 fps
Vertex Shader 53.5 fps
Pixel Shader 95.4 fps
Point Sprites 19.2 MSprites/s

CPU INFO
CENTRAL PROCESSING UNITS
Manufacturer AMD
Family Palomino
Internal Clock 1.30GHz
Internal Clock Maximum 1.46GHz
External Clock 133MHz

No Vid card oc.  XP1600

RESULTS
3DMark Score 7747
Game 1 - Car Chase - Low Detail 120.8 fps
Game 1 - Car Chase - High Detail 44.0 fps
Game 2 - Dragothic - Low Detail 120.9 fps
Game 2 - Dragothic - High Detail 64.3 fps
Game 3 - Lobby - Low Detail 121.8 fps
Game 3 - Lobby - High Detail 57.9 fps
Game 4 - Nature 39.2 fps
Fill Rate (Single-Texturing) 845.1 MTexels/s
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing) 1670.1 MTexels/s
High Polygon Count (1 Light) 20.4 MTriangles/s
High Polygon Count (8 Lights) 4.1 MTriangles/s
Environment Bump Mapping 127.3 fps
DOT3 Bump Mapping 125.2 fps
Vertex Shader 54.9 fps
Pixel Shader 95.7 fps
Point Sprites 19.2 MSprites/s


XP1900
RESULTS
3DMark Score 8388
Game 1 - Car Chase - Low Detail 130.1 fps
Game 1 - Car Chase - High Detail 50.1 fps
Game 2 - Dragothic - Low Detail 127.3 fps
Game 2 - Dragothic - High Detail 67.5 fps
Game 3 - Lobby - Low Detail 132.6 fps
Game 3 - Lobby - High Detail 63.3 fps
Game 4 - Nature 43.6 fps
Fill Rate (Single-Texturing) 845.2 MTexels/s
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing) 1670.3 MTexels/s
High Polygon Count (1 Light) 20.4 MTriangles/s
High Polygon Count (8 Lights) 4.1 MTriangles/s
Environment Bump Mapping 127.8 fps
DOT3 Bump Mapping 143.0 fps
Vertex Shader 55.0 fps
Pixel Shader 100.7 fps
Point Sprites 19.2 MSprites/s

The detailed fps results give you an idea of the fps to be gained by overclocking cpu's.
100mhz at Hires gives about 4 fps gain, nowhere near as much as fitting a better vid card would give you.
But i am happy with my 13fps gain by overclocking from 1500 to 1900.

[FOGOLD]

Fair enough. 13fps can make a big difference if you are down at 10 or 15 in smoke etc.

[Lephturn]

Well, it mostly depends on how much time and effort you want to spend, and how much you like to tinker.  You can potentially get between a 0 and 20% speed boost overall I'd estimate, but the 20% boost would be very rare IMO, but for most folks a 10% boost should be do-able for not much extra cost.

If you look at it from a $ perspective, OCing probably comes out close to even depending on where you are buying on the speed curve.  For example, if I spend $50 more on fans, a killer heatsink, and some higher quality parts for my rig so I can OC it properly and still have a stable rig, I have to see if that $50 could have simply bought me a faster processor.  However, if I'm buying closer to the top end of the price/performance range, the next CPU up might be several hundred dollars, so that extra $50 on good cooling and parts might net me more benefit than I could gain any other way.  Also sometimes I won't OC right away, but after my system has aged a bit and needs a bit more power, I'll OC to extend it's life.  This is only normally possible if I chose the right parts in the first place to be able to get a stable overclock, but personally I choose parts that are OC friendly so I can get extra life from my gear.  Depending on how much work it is (and how much time I have), on some stuff I'll tweak and OC it from day 1.

But for me, it mostly boils down to wether or not you will enjoy tinkering with your rig and tweaking it.  OC'ing will certainly take some time between researching parts, purchasing and installing some gear yourself, and actually adjusting your system and testing it.  If you want to learn more about computers in general and you would enjoy spending the extra time doing this sort of thing, it's definately worth it.  If you are busy and don't have the interest or time to screw around with your PC, then just buy the best you can afford and be done with it.

So only you can make the decision to OC or not, but I hope I helped shed some light on it.

[FOGOLD]

Thanks |Lephrurn. My problem is  I doubt its worth it even tho I am fascinated by the idea and want to try it.

The other is not that I don't have time for messing about with my PC but that I DON'T have time for trying to fix it when I screw it up:D

[Lephturn]

In that case, my suggestion is to simply purchase the best performing machine you can for primary use, and get a second machine to play with.  You can often find a used Celeron machine or something of that nature that you can work on for very little cash.  If you can swing it, that gives you another machine to much about with, OC, etc. and if it's down, it's not a big problem.  I do this myself and have a small home network, so I always have a machine around I can tinker with and still have my "main" machine for communications and gaming.