hardware tuning

[metalcowboy12]

hows it going i'm new to this forum but have been reading a few post and have been using the bench test from anandtech for a wile now to research my builds.
ive built computers for over 10 years now mostly just personal use for myself friends and family and sad too say I've never played around with over clocking or messing with the bios settings to completely tune my hardware.

i am in hopes of getting a little help or pointed in the direction of a good source for doing this. over clocking is not my primary goal alone im more interested in tuning the components so they work more efficiently and better together. I've read on a couple forums a little about changing the factory voltages, clocks, multipliers and frequency, ect. to help the computer run more efficiently, faster and more reliable. i know a lot about what values you use depend on the specific products and components you use, im trying to find out where a good starting point is to begin with for some of my current computers and future builds. hopefully that makes sense.

if it helps id place my tech level around medium/high in most respects but still far from computer master. any help would be greatly appreciated
thanks

 

[Dave3000]

First of all I suggest not messing with overclocking, especially if you want reliability. As far as tuning is concerned to get the best out of your hardware here is my suggestion:

1. Maybe disable C-states in the BIOS. Cpu will run hotter during idle, higher electric bill, and consume more power during idle and you will lose some turbo functionality if the CPU is an i5 or i7. Disabling all C-states in the BIOS allows SSD's to perform faster during low CPU loads as evidenced by Crystal Disk Mark. Also if your CPU's turbo boost feature is not aggressive, you might even gain CPU performance in most cases. For example, my i7-4820k's turbo is not aggressive and will only turbo boost 1 core and only up to 200 mhz, so I actually get slightly better CPU performance with turning C-states off in most things because and also get a lower DPC latency with C-states off unless running an app that is strictly single-threaded such as Cinebench's single core CPU test. Also when I had an i7-920 I had overall better CPU performance with C-states off than with it on since the turbo boost is not aggressive in that CPU either. If you want a lower electric bill and less power consumption during idle then don't turn these features off.

2. Set minimum CPU performance to 100% under Windows Power Management. My SSD performs better this way as shown by Crystal Disk Mark. Again you will consume more power during idle and have a hotter CPU during idle.

3. If you have a Nvidia card, set the performance mode to Maximum Performance in the display properties of the video driver. That way your GPU is running at full speed all the time when running a game or 3D application.