Performance gains noticable from overclocking?

[eXalin]

I currently have an i7 920 at default clock speed, I have no expierence with overclocking, I was wondering will there be a noticable gain in peformance?

What will I see in performance gains in? Frames? Bootup times(even though I think this is mainly affected by hard disk speed?)Application start ups?

Currently have an artic cooling freezer rev2, if anyone has one of these, what sort of clock speed should I expect if I overclock(bare in mind im a complete n00b)

 

[Marine-RX179]

It depends on what graphic card you got and what game you playing....

For most games in general, you won't see much increase in frame rate for GTX460 1GB or below, but for games that are heavily CPU dependent and not written to use the 2 extra core for main processing (i.e. WOW), or graphic card set-ups higher than GTX460 1GB then the extra speed would definitely help.

 

[cmndr_andi]

As above, most modern games won't perform much better due to overclocking, however some are very CPU heavy (eg. BF:BC2, GTA4) and do scale well with overclocking.

However, in CPU heavy applications (like rendering, video encoding, image/audio/video editing) then the performance increase is often almost linear with clockspeed. So if you are doing stuff like this often, then overclocking can be extremely beneficial.


Also, with the obvious trend that newer games will require more powerful hardware (especially when the new console generation finally arrives) if you overclock your machine then you can keep your existing machine for longer before requiring to pay a load of money for a major CPU/mobo upgrade.

 

[tjlld]

Well one thing you could do is overclock your graphics card. I got my GTX460 768MB up by around 25%.