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Overclocking is dying, Silicon Lottery announces shutdown

Grim5

Grim5

Grim5

Soldato
Joined
6 Feb 2019
Posts
19,405
Silicon lottery has decided to shut its shop.

can't blame them, CPUs for both AMD and Intel are now pushed to their limits by software automatically and often the differences are now so tiny that it's not worth it anymore to pay huge premium for a binning service that doesn't yield much if anything.

What is still surprising to me is that water cooling is still making a killing, despite lowering temps on cpu and gpu having negligible effects on performance in 2021, due to how "cool" they look water cooling parts and AIOs are still making a killing as people buy them just to look cool
 
I've felt this for a while now, as someone who has been buying chips specifically for overclocking since the 90s (Celeron 300A etc) it's now at a stage on Ryzen where all I do is overclock the memory. There's so much jiggery-pokery going on with power states, various voltages, PBO, boost clocks blah blah blah nowadays that it feels like a lot of work for not much gain over out of the box boosting, with the added risk of instability if you haven't set one of 1000 options correctly.

That's not to say people don't still make decent gains from overclocking, I'm sure there are some people more expert/patient than I tweaking more out of their kit but I've largely given up. I recently bought far and away the most expensive CPU I've ever owned (cost more than double what I've ever paid before, about 3x my normal spend) because the days of me just buying a cheap banging overclocker seem to be behind me.

Regarding water cooling, one of the reasons it is popular is because in this world of dynamic voltage and clocks it is sometimes the thermal dissipation that drives the effectiveness of the 'auto-overclock'.
 
Have to say when I've played with some of the newer systems not really felt it vs the gains and especially as it has been hard to beat some of the performance enhancement options in any meaningful way especially on Ryzen platforms.

The gains are much bigger on my X79 system.
 
Grim5 said:
Silicon lottery has decided to shut its shop.

can't blame them, CPUs for both AMD and Intel are now pushed to their limits by software automatically and often the differences are now so tiny that it's not worth it anymore to pay huge premium for a binning service that doesn't yield much if anything.

What is still surprising to me is that water cooling is still making a killing, despite lowering temps on cpu and gpu having negligible effects on performance in 2021, due to how "cool" they look water cooling parts and AIOs are still making a killing as people buy them just to look cool
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I stopped overclocking when Ryzen came about as i found that although i could get a single thread boost from a half decent overclock multithreaded performance dropped off to much and i use a few multithreaded apps were i really wanted that performance. I do still water cool though. I find the lower temps helps maintain the boosts longer for graphics card and CPU, plus i find it just looks cool too :)
 
I don’t even think about it any more. Just switch PBO on and crack on. Probably get 99% out of the chip so why bother risking instability for that pointless 1%.
 
Do people care enough about power consumption? Because from a technical perspective there's still a lot to gain from golden samples that sip voltage. Lower voltages mean less heat means the various boost clocks from auto OC can be held for longer. Manual overclocking may be dead, but the silicon lottery to finely tune your system is as important as ever.

But then if people don't care about silly volts and high temps then there's no market in binning for those low voltage golden samples.
 
It’s used to all about finding the right chip. Nobody seems to care anymore and all the top overclockers don’t want to even talk about them as they make a living from it. People like me don’t have the time to find, buy and test 20 revisions of chip and usually all the fabs produce chip with very close tolerance to each other.

Overclocking gems are likely still out there.
 
I just can’t see much point of overclocking but I was very much only a casual overclocker. I messed around overclocking my 3090 which does boost benchmarks but I didn’t notice anything significant in game. The increased cooling cost for a further small gain that’s probably not that noticeable is a big turn off for casual dabblers like me.
 
Iron Man said:
I messed around overclocking my 3090 which does boost benchmarks but I didn’t notice anything significant in game
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This is the thing, you don't overclock GPUs any more, you undervolt them to give the boost algorithms better power and thermal headroom. Now that the same concept applies to CPUs, I'm surprised Silicon Lottery have shut up shop; rather than finding the golden samples to get maximum clocks, you find the golden samples to get the lowest power draw so boosts can run higher and for longer.
 
It's been that way for a while now and that way since Zen 1 came along. I remember last year one of the big tech Youtubers showed if you overclocked a Zen 2 chip it would actually regress gaming performance vs leaving PBO on because PBO would give you a higher clock rate across 3/4 cores vs an overall lower speed on all cores which you got from manual overclocking.
 
Danger Bri said:
I wouldn’t overclock for performance gains, but you can get much lower voltage than stock and save heat. AIO’s are much smaller than air coolers, so it’s not all about looks.
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Biggest benefit of an AIO to me is dumping the heat directly out the case plus plenty of space inside the case for easy upgrades.
 
Jokester said:
This will make me feel less bad when I unsticky the How to Overclock threads.

I’ve not manually overclocked in years :eek:
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I still do it manually to lock the cpu at all core boost as far as i can, i never really changed from doing this since my 3770k. Getting the most out of it as soon as i get my upgrades.

Bit of a hobby as well i suppose to benchmark them too to get on leaderboards but less so now.
 
Seems like an apt time for Overclockers to have a name change to Undervolters.
 
LePhuronn said:
It's 2021. I don't understand why people still want to strap 2kg of metal to a fiberglass board 1.6mm thick to cool their CPU.
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Simple, effective, reliable, doesn't break the bank. How many times over the last year, say, have you heard of mb's breaking due to large heatsinks?
 
Reliability is the biggest argument for traditional heatsinks, worst thing that can happen is the fan fails and those are often easily replaced. With an AIO you've got pump, liquid, leaks, fans.
 
I've manually OC'd my CPUs since buying a Core 2 Duo E6400 in 2006, but now I have a 5900X it really isn't worth it outside of benchmarking, and even then I'm gaining well under 10%. As such I can see why overclocking is less common, I've certainly gained way more performance with RAM overclocking on the Ryzen platform than fiddling with PBO settings (in apps that are sensitive to it, such as Timespy where tightening timings saw a score uplift of 12%+).
 
I don't bother OCing anything other than the graphics cards these days.
Gone are the days where you could just alter your FSB or multiplier and that was that.
 
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