OC Sensitive Games: Do They Still Exist?

[Reznick]

In the process of upgrading again to the new Intel CPUs. Question is whether I go cheaper and overclock more. Or spend more and don't overclock at all.

In the past, although I've been able to overclock successfully for most things, there always appeared to be a few games that, despite stability with everything else, would always fail even if the CPU was overclocked a little bit.

Unreal Tournament and UT2004 seemed to be such games. These would hang or crash at the slightest OC adjustment. Since then, I haven't overclocked much, but only because of concern that some software might be so CPU dependent (like UT), that overclocking messes with the software somehow.

My question now is whether people are currently having any OC problems with specific games, or are the newer game engines better able to handle OC? Overclocking is great, but if I get one game crash associated with it, I'd revert back to the default settings in a heartbeat.

 

[Xdreamer]

I had a problem with Chaser, but thats an older game.

 

[JAG87]

BF2 is a prick with video card OC

it flickers like a mofo. it happens mostly when you crank the memory, and the corruption probably comes from heat. The thing that bothers me is that other games are fine, but BF2 textures seem to be sensitive.

 

[Reznick]

Thanks for the thoughts so far...

Like the post by DoodyBody in this forum, isn't OC overrated when despite all your efforts to make your system faster with OCing, you can't trust it with some of your games?

Just seems the time and effort (and cost) associated with tweaking and adjusting just to get a game to run without crashing doesn't seem as much fun as just playing the game with a few settings turned down. I'd rather be confident my system is stable at stock speeds. Or, am I being overly cautious?

 

[aka1nas]

If your overclock isn't stable in games, it isn't stable period. You can't just rely on either application or stress testing, you need to test it on both.

 

[DoodieBody]

Yeah, I'm still in the process of figuring mine out. It's pretty odd.

I'm thinking I need more vmch...but my mobo jumps from 1.25 straight to 1.45, which is more than I want to run without adding better cooling.

The only theory I can come up with why it's stable during stress testing but not gaming (it is totally stable at slightly slower clocks, even during gaming) is that the northbridge does affect communication with the pci-e slot (at least as far as I know) and apparently somehow that's making it need more juice. Most people with my board didn't have to give it more juice until 450FSB, but something about my setup could be different.

I've yet to fully stress test whether or not it fixed it...it seems to, but I'm not going to try it for more than 10 minutes, my NB gets way too hot.