do the cost benefits of an overclock wake sense?

badcompany · 11 Jan 2013 at 10:17

if you factor in the cost of higherend cooling and CPU cost does the gains (for gaming) increase over a non overclocking CPU make sense as most benchmarks the difference is negligible isn't it? with the VGA being the most important factor?

badcompany · 11 Jan 2013 at 10:19

make not wake ,lol

Addicted · 11 Jan 2013 at 10:21

It depends on the use, some CPU-intensive tasks/games it makes a lot of difference, some it doesn't.

You'll get the same argument when overclocking a GPU also.

JCX50 · 11 Jan 2013 at 10:26

zakblood · 11 Jan 2013 at 10:27

for me yes, less cost/more power, good cooling gives same amount or less noise than default fan etc and i got it done at source so no agro and better warranty

ie none if you do it yourself and it blows

JonJ678 · 11 Jan 2013 at 10:51

Air cooling, probably. Certainly lowering the voltage and upping the speed a bit on the stock cooler is pretty low cost, provided you bought a remotely decent motherboard.

Watercooling, probably not. You do it for quiet or for performance, not for cost.

d_brennen · 11 Jan 2013 at 10:58

There are several excellent sub £30 coolers out there, and even if I wasn't an overclocker I'd want a very quiet system, so would have decent cooling anyway. Before Intel decided to lock down most of their CPUs, there were great gains to be had. Now it's more for sport

The argument I always put forward in the "PC gaming is too expensive" threads is this - without gaming I'd still need a fast PC, I'd still want a big monitor, I'd still want it to be damn silent - PC gaming costs me the price of the video card, my current one was far cheaper than either the PS3 or Xbox 360. Same with overclocking

jakspyder · 11 Jan 2013 at 11:00

Thing is, you cant stock CPUs as fast as a low end OCed one.

If they released top end CPUs at stock 4 or 5Ghz then you may be able to argue it. But they dont so the only way to get those levels of performance is to overclock

Blue160 · 11 Jan 2013 at 11:42

I've never noticed any difference in my main rigs performance with it's large overclock. I don't do any encoding or rendering with it so I presume I'm not CPU limited by most of the things I do. I enjoyed doing it though which for me is the whole point

Bacon? · 11 Jan 2013 at 13:27

zakblood said:
for me yes, less cost/more power, good cooling gives same amount or less noise than default fan etc and i got it done at source so no agro and better warranty

ie none if you do it yourself and it blows

Eh???? If it blows unless youexceed voltage reccomendations 1.6v? Your covered.