The death of overclocking?

MarkAnthony

While I realise people will always overclock for the sake of it, something I quite enjoy myself tbh. Have we reached the end of useful overclocking?

Memory - Various tests show no difference on Intel platforms except in synthetic benchmarks.

CPU - absolutely no benefit to gaming anymore?

GPU - Okay at 4K yes it's worth it, however with the extra cooling etc required is it not better to just buy a better card?

Now I've been overclocking since I had a 166Mhz Pentium, I always saw the benefit in the past. More and more though I'm just introducing instability/heat/spending a lot of time mucking about (having fun usually!). I find myself more and more wanting it cooler and quieter. Perhaps I'm just getting old? :pac:

Thoughts?

dreamers75

Why does a dog lick its balls?

MarkAnthony

dreamers75 wrote: »

Why does a dog lick its balls?

I actually had the image of Capt. Kirk in ST5 trying to climb that mountain on his zimmerframe.

dreamers75

Seriously tho :pac:

Its because you can (dog too).

I only ever overclocked a Duron 800 to 1300 out of lack of money and necesssity to run the Bf42 beta. Everything else is simply because I can, overclocked a PCI DSL modem before for absolutley no additional gain just I could. But I always go way above the specified cooling needs, have never borked anything overclocking it.

if anything its too simple nowadays.

http://www.msi.com/product/motherboard/support/X99S-MPOWER.html#down-driver&Win10 64

I have this motherboard......its has an OCGENIE button on it...i just press it and my 5960 goes to 4g without me actually doing anything.

MarkAnthony

Actually THAT I can understand. Getting the cheapest bits and clocking the bollocks off them. Just the higher end stuff I'm beginning to wonder...

.G.

My 970 GPU boosts when OC'd to over 1500mhz from a stock of 1253mhz and I get 8 FPS for that. I see little point to be honest nor do I see any visual difference. The stats might say I have 8 FPS more but my eyes don't see it.

Eoinmc97

superg wrote: »

My 970 GPU boosts when OC'd to over 1500mhz from a stock of 1253mhz and I get 8 FPS for that. I see little point to be honest nor do I see any visual difference. The stats might say I have 8 FPS more but my eyes don't see it.

Depends on the delta. If you got an extra 8 frames going from 20 to 28, then it would make a difference. Going from 90 to 98 IMO is pointless.

I think overclocking high end stuff is pointless, after all, overclocking was usually done on lower end parts to squeeze value from them. I think overclocking only becomes worthwhile when the product is in it's final year, i.e you're gonna upgrade next year anyway.

If you look at Intel, their cores are operating at such fast speeds that it won't matter with the increase. AMD's CPUs have been rather poor, so overclocking is almost essential for them.

AMD GPUs on the other hand have had every drop of performance squeezed from them already, limiting your overclock, but also mitigating the need to. nVidia seem to have reduced the clocks of their GPUs to match power targets, which when those power limits are removed, they jumo up a bit, as does the performance. I actually feel nVidia cards are not worth their swlt until they're overclocked.

Memeroy....nah, don't need to.

.G.

Eoinmc97 wrote: »

Depends on the delta. If you got an extra 8 frames going from 20 to 28, then it would make a difference. Going from 90 to 98 IMO is pointless.

I think overclocking high end stuff is pointless, after all, overclocking was usually done on lower end parts to squeeze value from them. I think overclocking only becomes worthwhile when the product is in it's final year, i.e you're gonna upgrade next year anyway.

If you look at Intel, their cores are operating at such fast speeds that it won't matter with the increase. AMD's CPUs have been rather poor, so overclocking is almost essential for them.

AMD GPUs on the other hand have had every drop of performance squeezed from them already, limiting your overclock, but also mitigating the need to. nVidia seem to have reduced the clocks of their GPUs to match power targets, which when those power limits are removed, they jumo up a bit, as does the performance. I actually feel nVidia cards are not worth their swlt until they're overclocked.

Memeroy....nah, don't need to.

Only tested via Heaven and Valley Benchmarks but on Ultra I was in the upper region you mention, going from around 82 FPS to 90 odd. Little point. Games look great on base settings and look no different on max over clock. Its part of the reason I really don't know whether to bother with 144hz monitor over a 60hz one but then I've never seen the former and its obviously a much bigger jump than 8 FPS. But games still look great to me on a 24" 60hz. I need a bigger screen though!

BloodBath

It's down to cheap mid range cards having the power for pretty much everything maxed at 1080p/60hz.

There's still a lot of value to be had getting something like a good R9 380 and overclocking it for a free 15-20% performance gain that will give the extra legs needed for the more demanding games.

It's less important at 2560x1440/144hz since you aren't really going to care if you are getting 100fps or 144fps or even only 60fps in more demanding games.

It's first world problems when you are getting only 60fps at 1440p in the latest games.

ShadowHearth

Its like Tesco: Every little helps. Same with OC. I oced my 2500k and 680. CPU overclock helps in Arma 3 and GPU... Welll... Everywhere.

..Brian..

I OC, therefore I can!

MarkAnthony

Just finished overclocking:

CPU 4/4.4 -> 4.7Ghz
RAM 1333Mhz CL10 -> 1866 CL9
GPU 947/1200 -> 1050/1300 (Bloody OC util issues! was 1100/1500)
Monitor 60Hz -> 75Hz

To be honest I quite enjoy buggering about with it with kinda undermines my point!

I have the thing pretty quiet now too after switch the fans out and playing with the profiles, the mechanical HDD is now the loudest thing and very infrequently on.

TerrorFirmer

It's not what it used to be - remember when the E21x0 processors could be 100% overclocked and be competitive with a high end Core 2 costing six times more?

That doesn't happen anymore, chips like the G3258 OC well, but are still massively bottlenecked by the lack of hyperthreading and no amount of OC'ing can make up the gap.

Even with an almost five year old 2500K, even without any overclocking the graphics card is the bottleneck in pretty much 90% of games, even if you're a higher end card.

I was testing Battlefield 4 recently on a mildly OC'ed i5-760 from 2009 with a GTX960, no problem playing at 1080p ultra settings at all.

I don't bother with GPU overclocking, most models these days are OC'ed out of the box, and for me the gain is usually relatively small - let's say, 10% on average. I suppose at the lower end every little helps, but if you're running performance cards, it doesn't make any real difference.