Are we crazy and is it pointless to have CPUs over 1GHz? READ ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :)

[OC-Master]

I'm starting a big thread here :) and I want to know what people really think of Overclocking and passing the 1GHz mark. I mean, A 1GHz T-bird (266) isnt the bottleneck in almost any case. When you run Aquanox, Doom3, or Unreal2, the bottleneck will be the graphics card by far. So will it be pointless to overclock our cpus to insane speeds??


,....... Let the thread begin =)

[Tacoman667]

I personally like the bragging rights of how fast a CPU I have. I say DOWN WITH ALL THOSE INFERRIOR! Hehe, j/k.

[William]

the faster the CPU the more proteins you can fold. Who cares about FPS?

[OC-Master]

yea, I see where you are coming from with braggin rights but still, there has got to be a limit to PC performance. I know for sure my Windows wont operate any faster from 1.0GHz to 2.0GHz. The difference would be switching to a 256-bit graphics card over my 128-bit card and see twice the bandwidth for graphics information. I notice a 100% speed burst in internet explorer browsing between my sisters 1GHz chip and my 1Ghz chip, shes got a GeForce2 MX! and makes her Windows 100% faster graphically. Just think, 512-bit graphics are comin next year! Is this gonna be another 100% boost in Windows GDI graphics performance? Remember, I'm talking 2D here, not 3D.

[William]

On a more serious note, I think getting a faster CPU is a good thing. Windows may not run faster, but apps like Photoshop and other CPU and memory intensive applications will get a huge benefit from a faster CPU and DDR memory too. You don't need a fast CPU at all for windows, you need one for the Apps it runs.

[OC-Master]

OK, you know how Unreal2 can run with min requirements of a P2 450MHz right. Ok, and thats with a GeForce1, so then I believe that Unreal2 would run twice the FPS with a CELERON 400MHz with a GeForce3. Would this be true? The GPU would make life easier for the CPU allowing the smaller cpu to do the easier AI stuff :)

[KaHNZa]

William (Jul 29, 2001 09:10 p.m.):
the faster the CPU the more proteins you can fold. Who cares about FPS?

I think we have a winner johnny! Lets show him whats behind door number 1!

[TranceBear]

Since I rarely play video games I have to say it is the bragging rights.

[Ferg]

I think William made the best point. The CPU speed does effect protein folding and certain apps. Also I do think that it affects games. While a better video card also improves things your processor speed is also important. I know for sure that there would be a difference between 1 Ghz and 1.3 ghz (I used that since thats a pretty modest overclock for a 1 gig AXIA) for many games and applications and certainly for protein folding. In general for good performance you need a well rounded machine, and that includes a fast processor.

[AtomicGuY]

LOL, in folding@home, the first screen with the molecules bonding just flashes! I dont even get time to see them generate on the screen!!

a faster processor is always good!

:) and my take on DDR, its all hype, dont buy into it. Its a little faster but its all a bunch of crock! I never noticed any deference between my KT7a and my KG7! running @ 1.5GHz

[AtomicGuY]

and William,
I must congraduate you on so many amounts of postings. Are you planning to celebrate when you hit 4000? hehe, hope, its a good one. Man, 7 stars, you must have total power in these forums

[PDL]

Ya don't have to be crazy, but sometimes it helps!! LOL
I think it is 50% braging rights and 50% personal acheivement. You have to be willing to go where most computer users don't go or want to go.
If you couldn't brag about it and share it, it would be boring and pointless.
......Next........

[Colin]

Easy to say until you have worked on a machine at over 1.5 GHz. The difference in perceived speed from 1 gig to 1.7 gig is amazing. Once you have expereinced it, you never want to go back.

[Rottys-R-Us]

William (Jul 29, 2001 09:10 p.m.):
the faster the CPU the more proteins you can fold. Who cares about FPS?

Here Here :-)

And more SETI W/U's to Crunch.

Screw Factory Ratings !!!!

[hooziewhatsit]

If you have a beautiful muscle car, what's the main thing that you do with it? You show it off and brag, of course. By the same token, if you have a oc'ed proc, what do you do?

Also, there's the fun of pushing your hardware to the limit, then going a little farther.

[TranceBear]

hooziewhatsit (Jul 30, 2001 02:36 a.m.):
If you have a beautiful muscle car, what's the main thing that you do with it? You show it off and brag, of course. By the same token, if you have a oc'ed proc, what do you do?

Also, there's the fun of pushing your hardware to the limit, then going a little farther.

I have to agree with Hoozie

[Pitspawn]

Actually, If your a proud owner of a overclocked GeForce3 with good drivers the cpu is easily the bottleneck in some games at 1024x768x32 and below. I play Tribes2 frequently, my frame rate is lower than a friends pc who has only a GF2 and a higher rated processor. This is bugged coz I have a GF3 but its prolly my processor. Another good reason for a fast processor is for the SETI client or if you like 3D graphics (Just check my profile at the side). It was rendered in trueSpace 4.3 and has 4x4 Anti-aliasing, Volumetric Shading, ray-tracing to max and other affects. All bring my system to its knees and so my comp takes 10-15 mins for each frame. I tried to do an animated one for my own purposes and stopped halfway after a solid 42hrs. Processing speed is also a must if you are moving to a new OS (xP). I know I wont but they say that performance loss at best is 15-20%, sometimes as much as 30%. So you are going to need a fast processor.

Another point is that processors are just so cheap now. I remember just a couple of months back when I bought my 1.1Ghz discounted to £210 (~$300) now its literally half that. If you think about price compared to rate of technology there has been an apparent price drop for no reason (Intel competition maybe?). Most of all though I think people overclock to insane speeds for a good feeling and bragging rights. Us overclockers enjoy that little bit extra speed that others cannot experience. Its like beating technology so to speak. Imagine you could step a year, or two years into the future and take the computer from then to run todays application. Bottlenecking would be gone.

Thats why most people like 1.5Ghz+ systems. They like to beat technology.

[!-=sky=-!]

a faster cpu does help a lot in games especially when u have a crappy graphic card like me........(no name geforce256 sdr 32mb)

it's like putting a tnt2 with like 16mb or sth on a 1.5ghz sys

[13oots2]

Switching from my old K6 500 to an Athlon 900 improved my rendering times by a factor of 3, not all of this is due to Mhz. Saying that, I now have a 1000@1130 and it still is too slow for realtime rendering, by a very long way. Until I am able to render in realtime, I say keep the Mhz coming it saves me time and money.

[AMDGuy]

I think the biggest bottlneck in system today is the HDD. About a year ago when I upgraded my ATA33 5400RPM drive to a ATA66 7200 RPM model (both Western Digital) I realized a 50% increase in boot times. When I upgraded again to an ATA100 7200 I noticed a "slight" increase from the ATA66 model. Until HDD catch up with the rest of the system, these will continue to slow us down.

I plan on upgrading to a 1.2Gig T-bird soon to allow me to video cap at higher res (640x480). I don't play games at all so that's not a need for me. My Video card is an ATI AIW Pro 128 AGP 32Meg. It works fine for my needs, mainly being video creation. For me once I can cap at high res without frame loss and under MJPEG or similar compression, that's where my upgrades will stop for a while. I see no sense in going faster when you can't really do anything with the speed. Bragging rights are nice but at what expense?

[Angry]

hooziewhatsit (Jul 30, 2001 02:36 a.m.):
If you have a beautiful muscle car, what's the main thing that you do with it? You show it off and brag, of course. By the same token, if you have a oc'ed proc, what do you do?

Also, there's the fun of pushing your hardware to the limit, then going a little farther.

I have to agree and add the fact that most of us hardcore gamers who sit in front of a pc at least 6hrs a day want the fastest hardware our budgets can muster...and if we dindt overclock our processors where would we be now? Not at at this forum I belive...

[OC-Master]

But still, wouldnt 1Ghz be considered enough for anything? I know for a fact that video cards will only run this 1GHz T-bird at 40% of its full potential when FSAA 4X is enabled. By our standards today, it seems as if the GeForce3 or Radeon still isnt enough.

When we can run Aquanox at 1024x768x32 with 4X FSAA, and then score 60fps strait for an hour, I believe all hell will break loose :)

When I say 1Gig enough, I mean I'm talking for people with the 200MHz FSB limit and dont have too many more options with there boards. Isnt a faster GPU an easier way to double the framerates and boost overall speed?

Like someone with a 1gig t-bird paired with lets say, NV25 (GeForce4) compared to someone with da 1.5Gig birdy and a GeForce3, the guy with da geforce 4 will get better (FPS) right?

[AMDGuy]

AXIA (Jul 30, 2001 11:13 a.m.):
But still, wouldnt 1Ghz be considered enough for anything? I know for a fact that video cards will only run this 1GHz T-bird at 40% of its full potential when FSAA 4X is enabled. By our standards today, it seems as if the GeForce3 or Radeon still isnt enough.

When we can run Aquanox at 1024x768x32 with 4X FSAA, and then score 60fps strait for an hour, I believe all hell will break loose :)

When I say 1Gig enough, I mean I'm talking for people with the 200MHz FSB limit and dont have too many more options with there boards. Isnt a faster GPU an easier way to double the framerates and boost overall speed?

Like someone with a 1gig t-bird paired with lets say, NV25 (GeForce4) compared to someone with da 1.5Gig birdy and a GeForce3, the guy with da geforce 4 will get better (FPS) right?

I don't understand why this high FPS is so important. I don't play games at all so I could be missing something, but in doing video (which I do quite a bit of) anythign over about 30FPS the human eye can't detect. So yeah you can run at 60, 100, 150 FPS but you're eye won't see the difference. Unless games are totally different than the video I do, what's is really matter?

[Paul -The Mad Hatter]

AMDGuy (Jul 30, 2001 11:58 a.m.):

I don't understand why this high FPS is so important. I don't play games at all so I could be missing something, but in doing video (which I do quite a bit of) anythign over about 30FPS the human eye can't detect. So yeah you can run at 60, 100, 150 FPS but you're eye won't see the difference. Unless games are totally different than the video I do, what's is really matter?

Yes games are diff. 30 fps would be not be playable in my opion. anything much over 60fps you can't notice that big of an improvement.

[TranceBear]

~(-=->sky<-=-)~ (Jul 30, 2001 05:43 a.m.):
a faster cpu does help a lot in games especially when u have a crappy graphic card like me........(no name geforce256 sdr 32mb)

it's like putting a tnt2 with like 16mb or sth on a 1.5ghz sys

That was me a month ago, my little TNT did fine....lol

[OC-Master]

I'm not the smartest one to ask about 3D computing but isnt it true, you need 60fps to make a rendered 3D image 100% smooth without the sign of a trace? Even if our eyes can only see 45~50fps, all 3D game engines are all based at 60fps, I dont know why, they just are. Infact, I heard that in DirectX 9, they are implementing a engine that caps the Framerate at 60fps so that all your older games or apps will look stunning without running at insane framerates. Remember, this is somthing we could use since alot of us are runnning refreshrates way behond 60hz refreshrates on our monitors.

[dozier768]

just go play a ton of UT and CS youll beable to tell the difference between 30 and 100 fps "well isure can" as far as the overclocking goes what can i say "Hi my names dan,... and i am an overclocker" he he

[Pitspawn]

AXIA (Jul 30, 2001 12:31 p.m.):
Infact, I heard that in DirectX 9, they are implementing a engine that caps the Framerate at 60fps so that all your older games or apps will look stunning without running at insane framerates. Remember, this is somthing we could use since alot of us are runnning refreshrates way behond 60hz refreshrates on our monitors.

If this is the case the I will absolutely throw a fit. I do NOT think that 60fps can be considered 100% smooth. I can EASILY notice the difference between 60fps and 85fps. Once the framerate exceeds 85fps the difference is unnoticable. Remember our eyes can deal with with 50fps motion blurred images but needs at least 85fps of still frames to become 'flicker free'.

Another thing is that who actually plays in 4x4 fsaa on a GF3? I have a GF3 and at most I will play with 2x2. Personally I cant stand 4x4 as it is very slow in most games and causes texture misallignment. I play most of my games with no fsaa, to maximize framerate.

[fuzzba11]

No no no, the problem isn't getting our games to run at 30 fps, it's getting the average framerate above that. Then you don't have to worry about when you go into an area with smoke or ultra high polys. Personally I don't really notice until my games are running under 30 fps(watched in real time, not average), but that may be because I was running Quake 3 on my ol' P2 266 with a voodoo2 at 800x600 @30fps for all these years, and now I'm in 1600x1200 @90fps or above :)
I love the personal achievement, since you can't exactly brag to normal people about this sort of thing. They're just like "um, like, whatever". Plus benchmarks are great...like my first time breaking the 6000 3DMark2001 line, etc. I only know about 6 people in real life who would know what the hell I was talking about...

[Gonzo]

I work at an architecture firm and all our equipment is leased through IntDell. It is amazing how much difference there is between the 600 Mhz and 800 Mhz processers when it comes to rendering a drawing. Just a few years ago 200 Mhz was a huge step up, now in less than a minute I can adjust my bios and gain more than 200 Mhz. Technology is an awsome power. It is also fun to brag.

Then again, I have never owned a vehicle that was "stock", I always have to make it go faster. Think a computer will run on Nitrous?

[Bobby Manus]

I say get a gas power hs/f, just use your old lawn mower engine, probably 2 horse power, which is a whoooole lota cfm =) Hell you could hook up 20 fans to a 2hp engine, and could you imagine howe much fun it would be to have to pull a string to start your fans and then you can turn on the comp =)

[Matatoshi]

bragging rights? it's a hobby.

as a side note: i have reason to overclockX0r until my mp3's/divxs encode instantaneously and i get bored of max payne.


you want a real pointless reason other than video card bottlenecks? /me gives it up for obsessive compulsive disorder because i can't sleep at night w/out my system being overclocked :D

[William]

Actually having a high fps is important as your mind can miss a frame or something like that(Someone posted this here a while back). The HDD and CD-Roms are the bottleneck right now as AMDguy pointed out. But still. faster CPUs will do more plus there are going to be those apps that need it. With the small price differences in the Athlon market, it makes total sense to go for the fastest one. I think bragging rights aside, there are many people who have legitimate needs for faster CPUs. BUT, right now the GPU is not the bottleneck, the game community is franticly trying to keep up with the advancements. The games are the limit, not the graphics card anymore. Do you reach a point of diminishing returns with Framerate, yes, but you are going to put just a few more frames with a faster CPU.

[William]

AtomicGuY (Jul 29, 2001 10:12 p.m.):
and William,
I must congraduate you on so many amounts of postings. Are you planning to celebrate when you hit 4000? hehe, hope, its a good one. Man, 7 stars, you must have total power in these forums

thank you. I don't know what I will do depends on when it occurs. But I will say that stars do not show power in the forums, just how many posts I have. More a level of time to post than anything else. There are tons of smart people here with two stars that deserve every bit of respect as I deserve(ok, maybe I am a bad example how about using dan :D )

[killem1x1]

Colin (Jul 29, 2001 10:17 p.m.):
Easy to say until you have worked on a machine at over 1.5 GHz. The difference in perceived speed from 1 gig to 1.7 gig is amazing. Once you have expereinced it, you never want to go back.

I could not have said it better! Even my 1.4 to 1.5 is a very noted diference. Now that I'm at 1.7 stable, I could not think about anything less!

[Tithulta]

While I'm not yet at the speeds of the rest of you I noticed a huge difference 3 years ago when I went from a 100mhz dx4(intel) to my first personally built pc of 300mhz k6-2. A noticable difference the next year when I went to a 500 mhz k6-2. I've been stuck at his speed since, I also noticed a gaming difference with the 500 mhz and a voodoo3 300 agp from the previous card(a trident dunno anything else about it card). I can't wait in 2 weeks when I make the jump to 1gig as I'm upgrading to a epox ddr board. I want to upgrade video as well from the voodoo3, but I've been told it's not performing very well in 3dmark is due the processor and pc100 sdram.... so Im waiting til the gf3's are affordable without skipping a truck payment :D

BTW muscle cars ARE just like O/Cing ...they work just fine, but always seem SO much better with that extra power.(I own a 1969 mach 1 mustang @425 hp)soon I'll also have an o/c pc...this one doesn't like o/cing even though i have had it @560 something once, but since no temp gauge on it i didnt run it long.

[!-=sky=-!]

haaha

try jumping from p 200mmx to p3 800eb

that's what i did.......my parents wont get me a new comp for so long so i forced them to let me put together my own comp.....the p 200mmx was a compaq.......which was horrible....but when i got it it was like the newest comp and it costed 4000$ + canadian dollars.....what a rip off

[eobard]

Angry (Jul 30, 2001 10:44 a.m.):...and if we dindt overclock our processors where would we be now? Not at at this forum I belive...

That says it all. Is breaking 1 gig important to do? It must be, we're here aren't we?

[AZZKICKER]

what and where is Aquanox