Is overclocking still worth it?

[clv101]

I've overclocked all my desktops in the past, on air without anything too fancy:

Pentium 60 - @66MHz +10%
Pentium 150 - @187.5MHz +25%
Celeron 300A - @450MHz +50%
Thunderbird 1GHz - @1.4GHz +40%
E4200 (1.8GHz) - @3.2GHz +78%

In many of these cases the overclock matched the performance of a CPU significantly more powerful, and more than twice the price.

These days however, with all the automatic variation of clock speeds boost frequencies etc there doesn't seem anything like as much potential for improvement. Do many people still bother to routinely overclock the CPUs? What sort of improvements are seen?

Is overclocking the GPU a thing these days?

 

[Dalandius]

With the increase in the amount of binning done by the manufacturers there is going to be less overclocking headroom left for the consumer

 

[Toothy1911]

Totally worth overclocking still. My 10600K performs like a 10900K in games bumping from stock to 4.8 or 5.0Ghz.
Makes it very good value.
All the turbo boost stuff helps with power consumption. So it gets turned off as part of the overclocking to increase performance. For me at least.

Sometime fiddle with GPU overclocks, but find getting stable clocks more time consuming than CPU.

 

[Excleduess]

yeah, I'd say it is still worth it. It boosts the performance by a fair amount.

 

[WJA96]

It depends. If you can afford to buy a machine that does what you want ie. play games at the right frame rate then no. It’s not worth bothering with. And if you can’t afford it, then the option to turn up cheaper components so they do play those games is very much worthwhile. It’s a proper skill and very satisfying when it works, of course, when it all goes wrong it’s quite depressing and it doesn’t take long for your other half to figure out you messed up and take you to task for it.... Overall I’d say yes, still very worthwhile!

 

[doyll]

I agree with Dalandius

While some CPUs OC nicely, others don't .. it's not like the old i7 9xx series that OCed easy and way faster than stock. Really depends on what CPU you are looking at. I got a good deal on a 3600X and much faster then my current needs.

That said, RAM is tweaked for better performance.

 

[Randomface74]

Imo no because there's so little headroom the chance of instability is high.

 

[Meridian]

This a very old question, and my answer has always been: we don't do it because it is worth it, we do it because it is fun. Sure, we explain it to non-overlockers as "performance for free" but at any given moment the current top-tier hardware has been good enough for any given task at stock speed. We overclock because we want to. Most of us at least. Example: I have an 8600k at 5GHz on one machine. Which I hardly ever use. I overclocked it because that what I do. My main rig is a 9820X at 4.8GHz. Does it seriously need that extra speed? No. But it was fun getting there.

 

[clv101]

This a very old question, and my answer has always been: we don't do it because it is worth it, we do it because it is fun.

Historically, I certainly overclocked because it was worth it, my P150 at 187MHz on a 75MHz FSB outperformed the then top end 200MHz Pentium in most applications. The ~£50 Celeron 300A was close to the £250 Pentium II 450 etc.

I'm not seeing those sorts of gains from overclocking say a Ryzen 5 3600?

 

[Meridian]

Historically, I certainly overclocked because it was worth it, my P150 at 187MHz on a 75MHz FSB outperformed the then top end 200MHz Pentium in most applications. The ~£50 Celeron 300A was close to the £250 Pentium II 450 etc.

I'm not seeing those sorts of gains from overclocking say a Ryzen 5 3600?

I feel you are missing my point? I didn't say there weren't gains. I said that the gains were not why we do it. At best they are how we justify it to others, or sometimes to ourselves.

 

[clv101]

My point is I'm part of your 'we', and for me it was about it being worth it.

 

[Chris Beard]

I got an extra 25%ish out of my 1200af. There are still low end parts that offer significant overclocking headroom and bang for buck.

They tend to be the very low end AMD CPUs - so 3100 in the current gen. Intel opted out right about the time they started valuing MBAs over engineering talent.

Whilst the gains are 25% and not 50% they are still worthwhile!

The difference I've noticed over far too many years is that the mainstream overclocking culture seems to have moved from useful free performance to liquid nitrogen and bragging rights.

Perhaps I'm just old and grumpy - I do take RGB as a personal affront.