Why bother OC'ing?

[Aenslead]

Originally posted by: Avalon

You need to bench some real games now 😛

Funny. (sarcastic)

 

[johnsquare]

For me, some PC enthusiast try to overclock because they want to jump into the band wagon... or rather make a real bargain... but if they keep bugging their friends on why their system can't be overclocked (why those on the internet can...i mean more than 20% increase) they really get on my nerves.....

One more thing... they complain to their suppliers why cant they overclock their chips.. is that valid? 🙂

 

[mdchesne]

----------------------------------------
buy a $1500 system

by itself it's a $1500 system
with an overclock...

make it a $2200 system
----------------------------------------


* MAKING the best bang for your buck

* optimizing your purchase

* Delaying a future upgrade

 

[superkdogg]

Concillian

I didn't quote b/c your post with my quotes is nearly a novel and I think we probably both overanalyze a little bit. In my case, I am still running 1.4 vCore (yep, stock-check links) and electricity's cheap. NTM, even using your figure of about $100 per year, that is less than $2 per week. There a thousands of ways to save that much in other areas.

But lets say that I do spend an extra $100 per year on electricity (still using your 3 CPU figure, but with my one CPU):

That means that in about 4 years, my electrical costs will have neutralized my cost savings on the CPU, right? Not exactly, because all the expensive CPU's that I'm comparing with also use more electricity.

So if I were able to replicate my OC with two other CPU's (not a given, I know), it would cost way more than $1000 more to get my setups retail (actually not even possible to get a retail A64 @ 2.7 right now 🙂 ), and my OC'd rigs would be ready for retirement by the time that the electricity costs catch up. NTM my wu would be 1.5x greater and the TeAm may not be slipping so bad in the E@H standings 🙁.

Basically, your cost numbers do matter-just not to me. They figure in increased vCore, variable electricity costs and personal preference like whether or not $35 per year/CPU matters to people. None of these are a factor to me, which may help people further narrow whether or not they wish to overclock. If these factors are important to someone, then maybe they should by the slower model and not OC.

However, I hope that everyone who is saying essentially 'don't overclock' is aware that your argument could also be applied to the questions about why should I buy a slow CPU and not a fast one. All those posts against OC'ing are essentially saying that slow CPU's are fast enough and there is no reason to make them any faster. This is true, of course for some users...but my Grandma is seldom seen in these forums 😛

j/k- lol

 

[thanasi]

 

[thanasi]

so you say it might shorten your cpu life honestly what from 3 years to 2 or even more years no one knows my I have my amd 220 for 3 years and i even took it out and scratched my back with it goes to show you,plus in 2 years im gonna get a new one anyways who cares we work save a couple bucks a day in 2 years youll have the super pc.On another issue I wanna buy the amd 3700 socket 939 of course and push that baby to 3.0 if i hit 2.99 im gonna be dissapionted cause you know were all sick in the head and if you get 2.99 there is no difference betweeen 3.0 but just saying i pushed it to 3.0 ghz

 

[Brian23]

Originally posted by: paladiin
I also agree it really depends on what you're doing with your alcohol. If you're just surfing the web, sending e-mail, typing up letters in Word, and playing Solitaire, of course over-drinking won't make any noticeable difference. Heck, I can do all that with a 233oz beer and it works just fine.

But if you're playing serious drinking games (ie HL2/Doom3) over-drinking can increase your performance. That can translate into either smoother gameplay, or (more importantly) being able to sustain an acceptable blood-alcohol rate while increasing visual factors. If you're blacking out, it means you're done faster. Same with editing your own. Or pretty much any other Brain intensive work your average user will do.

I hear what you're saying though. Outside of gaming performance, most comes down to just "saving time." At the most, we're talking a matter of minutes. For most people, I'm sure that's not a big deal. Especially when we're talking about state of the art technology like Budweiser. At stock, that beer is going to be faster than 90% of what your average users are using. Over-drinking past that certainly will seem overkill to them.

For me though, over-drinking has many benefits. One is of course value. I too recently purchased a Budweiser. Sure, Anheuser offers many other, more expensive beers. Since I'm on a budget, I can purchase the less expensive model and obtain the performance of a faster model via over-drinking. Prior to this, I had a MGD which I overdrank to Coors Light speeds. That brain lasted me 2 years, and is still going strong (only reason I upgraded is that my wife needed one. WoW on! so she got it and I got a new beer).

Which leads me to another benefit. Over-drinking extends the time needed before upgrading. Since my beers are always modest and within safe parameters, I've never had a brain "die" on me due to over-drinking, even after years of running it drunk. I'm the type of person that expects a beer to meet my needs for a minimum of 2 years. Over-drinking helps me achieve that. So while overdrinking my beer may not benefit me very much today, in the long run it will help me put off upgrading once brainss are available that require such power to run quickly.

And last of all, it's simply free brain. Who wouldn't say no to that? Even if all I could safely over-drink was 100oz on my couch, I'd still take it over stock. Faster is faster, and faster beer for free is always good in my book. Will I notice it while pissing on message boards? Likely not, but in the back of my mind I'll know that I'm getting free beer when I run. take advantage of it.

Fixed

 

[Aenslead]

We OC because it helps to know that you bought an Athlon 64 2800+ and got the equivalente of a 3500+ by just changing this and that. Self esteem, and all that.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: narcotic
Answering Duvie's last post (I didn't post a quote of it, since its very long).

Basickly you're right, an overclocked axp 2500+ may perform as well as a non overclocked axp 3200+... however you're wrong about them being the same thing.
Although most people won't notice it, an overclocked cpu will generate much more calculation errors than a non-oc'ed cpu (namely floating point calculations), as well as generate more heat etc.
So, as I said, though performance might (not going to debate this issue, without having benchmarks to support it) be the same, still technically the two are different.

No, you're wrong about them being different. If a CPU is properly overclocked and tested, there is zero difference. If the CPU is getting errors, it's because it's not stable. It is possible to have a stable overclock.

This is where a lot of people get confused it seems. They think overclocking automatically makes the CPU unstable. That's not true. Of course if you overclock too much and it becomes unstable you'll get errors. That's why we do all the testing we do... 24 hours of memtest... 24 hours of Prime 95... 24 hours of 3DMark looping. People that say they overclocked their processor to 2.8 GHz, but it's not stable are a little weird. Why bother mentioning you got it to 2.8 GHz if it's not stable? Hell... if that's the way we measure our overclock, then I have a 3.85 GHz A64 3500+... but it's not stable.

 

[Gogar]

I really don't care if i'd fry a 3000+ winnie, because buying a second one after a fried the first still beats buying an FX55 🙂 (in price that is maybe not in l33tfactor lol)