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Is underclocking worth it

RickST

RickST

RickST

Associate
Joined
5 Feb 2008
Posts
1,261
Hi Friends,
So heres the deal. I had a download rig, an old dell something something. It died the other day.

I have a gaming rig, about two years old. Q9550 which I don't use anymore as i have a macbook and a xbox360, so my question is, Is it worth underclocking the gaming rig, turning off/down the fans (antec 1200 is loud) OR should i just build a new nas/download machine?

a side note, the gaming pc now has the drives from the dead machine giving it 10tb of storage.

any other solutions are also welcomed.

one of which would be to use my ec2 servers and stream for there... not sure how much that would cost in the long run though.
 
Look at undervolting. This is where you will reduce temps and power.
I would suggest you sell it and buy a HP Microserver if they are still doing cashback. About 20 watts idle and 40 watts load with 4 drives.
 
A Q9550 is overkill for that sort of use. They sell for big money (£100-130), DDR2 also gets good prices if they are 2GB sticks and 775 motherboards still fetch a tidy sum.

So I would sell the parts and buy hardware that better suits its purpose. Or at the very least, sell the Q9550 and put in a E7200 or something and undervolt.
 
If your trying to reduce power/heat then as mentioned undervolt.

I have reduced memory, chipset and CPU voltages, I was surprised how much I could reduce and still be stable.

It helps if your running a more stable PSU, I'm running Seasonic X. Drop voltages one at a time in small increments, then do a CPU burn in to test. Once something crashes take voltages back up over to where computer crashed to give a voltage margin. It's a bit of effort/time but worth it in long term.
 
Thanks for the info guys, I wouldn't feel right selling the pc as its not the most stable thing in the world and I don't know exactly what is causing the problem so wouldn't want to sell someone something dodgy.

Will try to undervolt over the xmas break so how it goes, can you damage the cpu by going too low?
 
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