Any point overclocking for less than 50%?

mranderson

mranderson

mranderson

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Have been overclocking systems for ages but recently (last 2-3 years) I cannot see the point unless it makes an obvious difference ie increase CPU by at least 50%.
As a simple test I overclocked random PC's every day at work for a week and asked the users to record everyday if they noticed anything different in their PC's (more/less responsive etc).
The overclock was by 25% (3GHz --> 3,75GHz) and it didn't make any difference to the responses I got back.
I guess there is always some fun tweaking things but in real life it doesn't make any difference.
 
For games, it depends of the Graphics Card being used. Some cards can be held back by the CPU that supplies the signal (bottlenecking) but in most cases you are right. Overclocking is a bit of fun but occasionally, it's the difference between playable and non-playable :)

edit.. what card do you have?
 
mranderson said:
Will a 50% increase in CPU freq translate to a 50% increase in frame rates if the CPU was the bottleneck? I seriously doubt it
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It's not as simple as that, increasing the CPU speed will relieve the CPU bottleneck. Now if your GPU is at 90% utilisation originally then if you OC the CPU far enough you'll gain 10%, then you're GPU limited. If the GPU is only 50% utilised you could double the frame rate depending on how far you can push the CPU.

This is all highly variable as CPU and GPU usage changes rapidly during games.

If you're doing something unrelated to the GPU eg encoding, the a 50% overclock will give you a 50% more performance.
 
Minstadave said:
If you're doing something unrelated to the GPU eg encoding, the a 50% overclock will give you a 50% more performance.
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To quote you, its also not that simple with encoding afaik or experienced.
I compared fps for a dvd encode (megui in combination with avisynth)
on a stock 3770k (3.5) and then another @ 4.5 (30% increase) and i can tell
you, there is no direct corrleation between clock % and fps (frames per second)!

I gained about 5-6 extra fps (10-15% increase over stock fps) which is still a result when you consider how many frames there are in a movie.
Therefore, 30% OC is worth it from my day to day stuff!
 
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True, I had over simplified - other factors have an effect, RAM bandwidth, RAM capacity/paging, storage speed, whether you're using hardware acceleration etc.

But CPU heavy tasks benefit from CPU overclocking the most. Maybe encoding isn't the best example, folding may be better.
 
Oh and the other thing, most CPUs are sold at a range of speeds, normally slowest to fastest is less than a 50% speed difference.

People will pay big money for small speed bumps.
 
Its a shame that sites like anandtech dont show comparisons on their software benchmarks between stock and OC. Would like to know myself what kind of gains are achieved. Encoding is pretty much exclusively dependent on CPU so even a 5fps increase is magic. You werent far off and i wish OC was directly related to fps lol.
 
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Minstadave said:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2008/11/06/overclocking-intel-core-i7-920/10

As an example, 50% overclock drops encoding times by a third.
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1:1 performance scaling with clock increase certainly happens in some cases but with regards to encoding, a 50% increase in OC might net 30% but relative to x264 settings.
Decreasing stuff like bitrate, subme, ME Algorithm, etc substantially increase fps but you end up with piece of crap, so whats the point.

In regards to that x264 benchmark

1) bit-tech do not disclose their actual x264 settings so its difficult to gauge and contrast.
2) Im comparing fps and their units are measured is time which is misleading.
3) That a is test from 2008 where x264 as a codec was in its earlier state. Since that time x264 has become less efficient than it used to be adding time to encodes because of resulting increase in bitrates to cover reasonable transparency.
4) Keeping all that in mind, i would take those results with pinch of salt and reiterate that the kind of gains you achieve with encoding after OC is relative to software, codec, settings, etc.
 
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Rubicant said:
To quote you, its also not that simple with encoding afaik or experienced.
I compared fps for a dvd encode (megui in combination with avisynth)
on a stock 3770k (3.5) and then another @ 4.5 (30% increase) and i can tell
you, there is no direct corrleation between clock % and fps (frames per second)!

I gained about 5-6 extra fps (10-15% increase over stock fps) which is still a result when you consider how many frames there are in a movie.
Therefore, 30% OC is worth it from my day to day stuff!
Click to expand...

The 3770K will automatically overclock itself to between 3.7 and 3.9GHz depending on how many cores are being utilised using Turbo Boost.

4.5GHz is really only a 15.4-21.6% overclock over the Turbo Boost overclock.
 
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The only time I have ever approached a 50% overclock was on the Athlon XP 1700+ thoroughbred, stock at 1466MHz and OC at 2100MHz. That was for the lolz and I do not think much productive time was spent on test benching fps or encodes at that time.

Most of the time I am happy with 20-25% or less as CPU's are much quicker now and bottlenecks tend to be elsewhere. Also software does not rule anymore and even modest processors can carry out most tasks. Overclocks assist in getting the best from a GPU setup though.

My day to day OC is about 10% above turbo, I am more interested in silence now than raw frequency. I will always push a new processor to see what it will do though.
 
As one who has never overclocked or played any games I have never really understood what a faster processor gives an average user - that said, it won't stop me buying a 3570k soon...!
However, when trying to work out what to upgrade on the odd occasions that I do it seems very hard to find out what sort of chip is worth buying and just how much to spend.
A quick play on a friends z77/3570 pc and it seemed so much more snappy to open documents/pictures etc but task manager shows me to be using 20-50% of the computers power at most..
 
Surveyor said:
The 3770K will automatically overclock itself to between 3.7 and 3.9GHz depending on how many cores are being utilised using Turbo Boost.

4.5GHz is really only a 15.4-21.6% overclock over the Turbo Boost overclock.
Click to expand...

Thats a good point. Not accounting for tubrbo boost (+300mhz) thats still only 15-20% overall. Will have to take pictures next time and remove turbo boost to get a better idea.
 
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