Originally posted by: dklingen
To all,
My forum question was a total failure. The feedback was completely opinion based. Only one single respsone provided ACTUAL performace data.
My bottom line is that I do not see the value in voiding the warranty on your CPU for a 10 fps gain. Rarely in any game are you on the 40fps threshold where the 10fps makes the key difference. Also, frame rates swing dramatically in games. I have seen Half Life 2 go from 30fps looking one direction to 87fps looking another direction.
Anyhow the reading was interesting...
The only information you need to look at are the performance differences between processors in games if you care to see the improvements made due to cpu overclocking. Simply log on to Anandtech, Tomshardware and Xbitlabs or other sites and look at the performance comparison between P4 2.6 vs. P4 3.4ghz and A64 3000+ vs. FX55. Sure the performance will not be night and day because even a P4 2.6 and a64 3000+ are aleady fast enough for games today. However, this analysis is flawed since gaming is MOST dependent upon the videocard and not the cpu. CPU certainly matters, but the videocard is what determines the difference between playable vs. unplayable. As long as your cpu is past AX2500+ or around that, you will extract more performance from a videocard and not a cpu upgrade (ie. overclocking). However, getting your cpu and videocard overclocked (and ram) will allow you to get an overall faster system (and for cheaper too, hence value of overclocking). All increases together will certainly result in a smoother gaming experience.
If you care to view more information about the effects of cpu vs. gpu performance in games please refer here:
The Real Deal - If you want a gaming rig, spend 90% of your funds towards a videocard and not the cpu.
TheSnowman's quote helps to address your value with overclocking - in this case, primarily the importance of cpu speed:
Faster videocards give better benchmarks, but the cpu often determines your minimum framerate; the later being most important for a good gaming experience. But obviously, as long as your cpu is good enough you might as well get the best videocard you can.
Thus, overclocking will allow achieving higher cpu speed and thus higher minimum frames, resulting in a smoother overall gaming experience for less than the cost of a higher clocked cpu to which one can overclock to with little effort or low cost.
Let's consider the case of Minimum Frames for a moment:
Choosing the Best CPU for Doom 3 - minimim framerate
You can see that A64 3000+ gets 28FPS as the minimum in doom 3. Sure from the average standpoint 10 frames per second do not usually make much difference. Now go to the graph, where you'll see A64 3800+ @ 2.4ghz get a minimum of 36 frames. An improvement of 8 frames suggests that the processor allows for a much smoother experience since <30 can be very choppy. The value of overclocking is increasing those min frames VIRTUALLY FREE.
Now let's consider Half-Life 2:
Choosing the Best CPU for Half-Life 2
You can see that at 1024x768, A64 3000+ gets 55 frames and A64 3800+ gets 68 frames. Both systems will be incredibly smooth since the average frames are close to 60. However, the 3800+ will be smoother since the minimum frames have to be higher to produce a greater average.
I think what you should understand is that for gaming, overclocking the processor does gain you a much smaller improvement than what overclockers lead others to believe. Why is this so, again, because the videocard is much more important. However, the processor still helps to increase the min frames, thus increasing the smoothness.
The results explain where the recommendation to have a processor of 3GHz frequency or 3000+ rating comes from for smoother gaming. As long as your processor falls close to that rating or above, additional cpu speed is going to give you a marginal and not incremental smoothness for gaming, reducing the "true" value of overclocking.
Still, isn't getting something better for cheaper a value in its own right?
Also consider this:
"First of all, let me tell you a simple piece of news: there are no motherboards for overclockers by design. That's just a myth. There are BIOS versions for overclockers. Such a BIOS can be written for any motherboard. There are only two kinds of motherboards: correctly designed / of a high quality, and incorrectly designed / of a low quality. Other motherboards are just variations between the above mentioned extremities. A correctly designed motherboard of a high quality possesses some safety margin, which allows it to operate even in non-standard modes (to a certain level, of course). A "bad" motherboard is already in strained mode, so any deviations from it result in failures. On the whole, an overclocked motherboard has only one simple task: to "die" later than the CPU or memory. Such a motherboard will do for overclocking experiments. Is it designed for overclockers? Sure it isn't! It's just a well designed motherboard of a high quality and these properties will be useful even if no overclocking is expected." - Digit-Life.com
Essentially then, processors that overclock, are processors whose manufacturing process is more mature allowing for a more stable operation beyond standard performance (similar to "overclocker's" motherboards). Overclocking will then maximize the value of that processor by increasing the boundaries of "safe" operation beyond intended stock performance, hence extracting a maximum stable margin limit out of such a component.
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