Is 3ghz enough?

[Sash]

So I have recently managed to clock my cpu to 4ghz and it brought up the question in my head whether its worth keeping it at 4.

I will probably keep my PC at 4ghz just "because I can" I think this is a reason why most people clock to 4ghz and beyond is "because they can" from articles I have read there doesnt seem to be much improvement in the majority of games with going from 3/3.2ghz to more. So I am asking whether 3ghz will always be the optimum stock clock speed for processors in the future.

Of course, there are circumstances where clock speed can make a difference (rendering and the likes) but obviously this could easily be solved by adding more cores and programming these programs to use all the cores.

For the people with 4ghz or thereabouts what are your reasons for the drastic overclock and do you notice much difference in your tasks?

 

[nbkpsycho]

I will just keep mine at 4ghz because i can just like you have said

 

[Bradley8988]

4Ghz is soo much nicer than 3. 3 is a odd number for one lol. Also i dont spend silly amounts on cooling to leave it close to stock.

 

[Sash]

Do you see the difference in performance though?

 

[Bradley8988]

In my head maybe, my cpu was always over 3Ghz stock anyway. Seems a waste not to OC it.

 

[Sash]

Lol, yeah it does. But some people think why spend lots of money on cooling when 3ghz is enough for most things.

 

[Bradley8988]

E-peen. For stuff like encoding im sure a extra Ghz will make a few mins difference. Benchies too make a difference. Im sure depends on the set up your using to if theres a point. I play the 10 year old game of tribes and going from 3.33Ghz to 4.4Ghz adds nearly 100fps lol. Average is about 750fps but modern games are different.

 

[JonJ678]

Makes a difference for computationally difficult things. A 4ghz processor does rather better than a 3ghz for computer aided design. Mathematics seems to scale pretty linearly with clock speed, so if it takes less time running each equation on mathematica that's a sale. The difference of a few seconds each and every time makes itself felt after a few hours.

I overclock because to ideal computer is one that I never have to wait for, and overclocking takes me closer to this ideal. I don't play games more demanding than morrowind, so frames per second doesn't matter to me.

 

[Sash]

Makes a difference for computationally difficult things. A 4ghz processor does rather better than a 3ghz for computer aided design. Mathematics seems to scale pretty linearly with clock speed, so if it takes less time running each equation on mathematica that's a sale. The difference of a few seconds each and every time makes itself felt after a few hours.

I overclock because to ideal computer is one that I never have to wait for, and overclocking takes me closer to this ideal. I don't play games more demanding than morrowind, so frames per second doesn't matter to me.

I wonder why some of these programs don't include options to set the processing unit to your graphics card. Surely modern graphics cards can do a lot more number crunching than processors. Thats why Folding@Home is a big thing.

 

[Bradley8988]

I think Photoshop is doing that exact same thing now adays.

 

[JonJ678]

CAD programs do as well, but they insist on a quadro to achieve it. Those aren't so cheap, but I'm having good results persuading my 8800GT to run using the quadro drivers.

Mathematica isn't so keen. Numerical precision is important there, and while graphics cards are great at sheet volume of calculations I believe they suffer from getting the answers very slightly wrong. That hardly matters for CAD or photoshop, and not at all for throwing pixels at a screen, but mathematica would object.

 

[Sash]

I think this is where Larabee comes into play? They are combining processors and graphics to do the job. (I think)