New PC, worth overclocking ?

karlosthemarra · 5 Jan 2019 at 21:55

I’m new to PC’s and gaming on them all together, just built my first from here and I’m extremely pleased with it. Been looking into overclocking and was wandering if it’s worth it in my situation? My sons getting around 110 FPS on fortnite on ultra settings, and we’re console gamers so it’s already a huge difference, but I’ve always been one for tinkering and getting the best out of what I’ve got, whatever it may be ! (Cars, bikes etc)

Rig is:

Gigabyte B450
Sapphire Radeon RX 580
AMD Ryzen 5 2600 (Stock cooler)
Antec Earthwatts gold pro 550W PSU
TeamForce Vulcan 2x8GB 3000Mhz

Is this overclockable without changing the cooler or psu? If so, will I see enough gain to warrant the tinkering, especially as it will be a lot harder for me as I’ve never done it ?

Tia!

LuckyBenski · 5 Jan 2019 at 22:02

I think you have a decent power supply - allowing less than 200W for the graphics card and less than 125 for the CPU, you're looking at about 350W for the system right now. As it's a decent brand and model of PSU k would say it's safe to run it up to 80-90% of its rating maximum before upgrading.

That said, the Ryzen chips usually overclock themselves reasonably well AFAIK. I'd look into a little GPU overclocking but until you're struggling to get enough performance, no need to stress the system.

Unless you have a high frame rate monitor you won't see the difference going over 60 frames per second anyway.

karlosthemarra · 5 Jan 2019 at 22:10

Forgot to mention I have a 144Hz monitor! (MSI Optix 144Hz Freesync)

How hard is it to OC? I say I’m new to PC’s but I did have them back in the Diablo 2 LOD days as I was a massive D2 player back then, I just haven’t had a decent rig for many, many years. I am pretty handy and can follow instructions quite well. I’m just worried I’ll screw something up for trying to gain a small margin, which would be pointless

LuckyBenski · 5 Jan 2019 at 22:30

So long as you look after temperatures (yes probably an upgraded CPU cooler) and don't do silly things with volts you should be fairly safe.

First though check your motherboard's VRM section and cooling - if it's not very good then it might not handle much extra power draw. Some basic B450 boards have quite simple VRM sections.

I would also download MSI Afterburner and monitor GPU/CPU usage - see what is limiting performance. If it's the GPU it's worth overclocking that. I'd check what clock speeds the CPU is running at right now too.