Has the age of overclocking and chasing numbers ended?

mattyfez

mattyfez

mattyfez

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Seems to me it has..

Undervolting for the same FPS in games to run cool and fast to save power and heat.

I'm talking about gaming here, not heavy compute stuff...
 
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I think you're right in that it has. As Tetras said, the average buyer (like myself) has no need of it anymore. My self built PC will handle all the games I play in 4K at Ultra settings without OC.

Running cool and quiet is more attractive to me now, although my son still enjoys tweaking things for best performance. He has no actual need for it though.
 
Definitely agree the cool and quiet approach has taken over simply chasing the speed numbers from before. Especially given that energy prices are nowhere near like they were before.

Also, cooling back in the day when overclocking was desireable, was not quiet; Nowhere near quiet. So the "quiet" approach was never an option (Think early 00s). That's changed however, and the quiet option (at expense of speed, and now speed and power) is now not only an option, but an attractive one.
 
Yeah I reckon overclocking is a lot less relevant for the average user, the parts are already near their maximum performance.

I didn't even bother this time round, I just went for a 12700 non-K, set the powerlimits higher and I'm happy with it. No tuning, no stability testing, etc. I'm pretty sure had I gone for the K version I wouldn't have been happy with the overclocked performance uplift vs power trade off.
 
I finally gave up when I built this current pc not long after the 12*** series launch and bought my first ever non-K cpu. I have found that with each generation overclocking headroom has dropped further and further to the point that it's simply not worth it anymore. I even got rid of my watercooling setup earlier this year and went back to air after 17+ years of watercooling. Even gpu overclocking is simply not worth it anymore. You can increase clocks to the maximum a card can do while drawing stupid amounts of power only to see a couple of fps being gained. What's the point? The sad thing is that while overclocking had practically been killed off power draw has gone through the roof to ridiculous levels so now undervolting is the new overclocking and we are seeing how low we can go with power and temps. I haven't done it with my cpu but have with my 3070 and knocked just over 100w off peak gaming power draw. It now runs cooler and quieter and actually boosts higher and longer than it did at stock.

I miss the simple days of socket 775 where it was common for 1Ghz+ overclocks and sometimes even double the stock clock speeds!!
 
Overclocking is dead as it used to be for sure. It's still possible to overclock but the gains are small compared to the old days, and you're often going to need power and thermal headroom in hand, which is a big limiting factor.

I do miss it to some degree. But it's also nice to have decent performance from hardware out the box provided you give it good enough cooling.
 
Yeah I had a Q6600, then an 6600k and now a 13600k...

I had a gx2 GPU too back in the day...was a pretty good card IIRC...two GPU's on one card, onboard SLI baby! hahah

I did overclock this new one, but it seems better at stock with an undervolt, as the OC gains were minimal when compared to the additional heat and power consumption.
:D
 
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