Why overclock?

[Dizzie]

after you've spent £100s on extra cooling, etc you've gained an insignificant performance gain and lower your Components life spans quiet a lot. Why didn't you spend that £100 on buying a faster CPU in the first place?

Was it really worth it?

[Marcus]

Dizzie,

The reason is many actually.
If a & 200 cpu does 1.8 GHZ at default and MAY overclock to 1.9, you´re definatley right, but if a & 60 cpu that does 1.4 at default, but with a good heatsink as AX7 or Alpha does 1.9 with onboard voltage, its a great win, at least for me.
Even though the lifespan is shortened doesn´t mean that it dies after 3 weeks. I have been running mine at the speed in my sig since i got it before xmas and it prolly run for as long as i want it to do.
In this business, cpu:s gets old very fast anyway and i dont think i use my cpu for longer than 7-8 months before getting a new anyway.

Cheers!

Marcus

[Graeme*Kustom*]

It varies - sometimes there's little point nowadays in overclocking, because the speed gains may be minimal . However, if you overclock a top end chip , you can have a system that is performing faster than anything else on the market - that literally makes your system 'better than money can buy' at that stage in time, which can be more productive but is also good for bragging ! There are instances where overclocking can save major money - my home PC is a 1.6A Pentium 4 Northwood (512k cache) - it cost £139 when I bought it. Using a Zalman flower P4 cooler (and NO case fans installed at all!) the chip overclocks to 2150mhz and is rock-solid stable (and silent too). Consider at the time I bought this CPU, that a 2.2P4 from Intel would have set me back about £500. It's instances like these when overclocking still is very worthwhile, no-one can argue with that. When you consider that CPUs are made in batches in first and only 'marked' at the end of the production line.. it may be my CPU is of similar quality to a 2000/2200 chip - it's running at sub 40 degrees temps at all times, at stock voltage, so I'm not really going to shorten the life of the cpu. And even if it does die in 12 months time (very unlikely) I know I've saved myself £350 - I'll go and buy a new CPU !!!

[iggy]

used to be totally for performance boost with stock parts, around which an entire industry formed, and excellent shops like kustom (soon as i get a job your stocks gonna be depleted by the way) and the like sprang up because of it

[Graeme*Kustom*]

we're not actually (and it's funny how we're always associated with this) an 'overclocking' site as such - there's no big huge delta fans and things like that !! I guess though the kit we're doing crosses territory with the likes of OcUK , OCS etc so we kinda fit in that category , but it's never really been our intention !

[Hutchy]

My current system is a 1.4 ghz amd thunderbird, 512mb ddr, chaintech 7jkdo, hercules prophet 3 ti 500 (gf3 ti 500), got a semi big cool master heatsink and fan and soon to get a liam li pc 65 i think it is the 60 with the window.

Basically i havent over clocked before just wondering wether its worth it im sure with the new case it will be cool enough?
what u reckon ? ;)

[Geekster]

first and foremost it has the "geek Factor" it's especially usefull when comparing your system against identical/similar speced rigs and yours just has the edge. also very handy when your cpu starts to show it's age, you just whack up the speed a bit, and you save yourself the hastle of buying something new. so the 100 quid you spent on cooling it (more about that later) isn't wasted, infact it's a bargin!

it's fun! check here (http://totl.net/Eunuch/index.html) this is really what you can do if your willing to play, and look, CHEAP

my personall success, is getting my Celeron 300A to a stonking 468MHz with stock cooling, and ALMOST beating the 550 barier with some enhanced AlphaCooling :) (30 quid cooler, again, this was blowing any system out of the water with its GeForce 1 overclocked, it was getting 3Dmarks 50% above average :D)

[iggy]

graeme, what i meant was that case modding is a sort of evolution from ocing.
ocing->cooling->ugly cases->need for nice cases->kustom :)

[Graeme*Kustom*]

yeh - kinda what i meant by 'overlap'