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Overclocking and Game performance

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Hellmut34

Registered
Joined
Mar 7, 2008
I thought i would start this thread to discuss the performance of overclocked processors complimenting GPU's

At the moment i have my e4600 mildly overclocked to 2.59GHZ with my DDR2 800 memory running @ 860MHZ

Within my system i have an HD3850 pro PCI-EX graphics card (no slouch)

MY question is

1) Will the E4600 @ stock (2.4GHZ) be running with the GPU with no bottleneck?

and if so

2) Is my mild overclock actually required for gaming, and could i just move back to stock speeds with little or no impact on gaming performance?

:argue:

Off you go then guys :)
 
Very simple- Check gaming performance at your current overclock settings, both frames per second and just the overall "feel" that you get. after that, set your chip back to its factory settings and do the same. Check your frames, and see how it feels overall.
I would think that you will find a very small difference, if any, considering that you are only overclocked by ~200mhz according to your numbers. If, however, your frames per second drop significantly and it feels more sluggish overall, the cpu could very well be the bottleneck.

I don't have a straight yes or no answer to your questions, but at least you know how you can find them out :)
 
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There is no straight "yes or no" answer to this.

If you are playing Crysis at 2560x1920 at Very High settings, chances are your CPU will not be the bottleneck.

If you are playing FreeSpace 2 at 640x480, chances are your CPU is the entire bottleneck.

Just about everywhere else is the "gray area", where your CPU and GPU will trade places being the bottleneck depending on the game, the resolution, the level, the scene, hell even the direction you happen to be looking.

I love bringing these points up to everyone who argues that a high-end video card is crap when linked to an "old" CPU:

The CPU does not accelerate anisotropic filtering
The CPU does not accelerate antialiasing
The CPU does not accelerate resolution increases
The CPU does not accelerate texel or pixel fillrate

Now, I'm going to add the following:
The GPU does not accelerate AI
The GPU does not accelerate primitives
The GPu does not accelerate physics (yet)
The GPU does not accelerate input
The GPU does not accelerate BSP / Octree traversal

The cliff notes are this: a game engine relies on all of these things, and various ones can come into play at various times. It is essentially IMPOSSIBLE to find a "perfect balance", increasing the speed of your CPU alone will show gains, as will increasing the speed of your GPU alone.

The trick is to find what works for you.
 
Ok guys thanks for the answers.

I play World of warcraft alot and i must admit that last night i tried 3 different settings and they all produced similar results.

I think i will re-load Company of heroes and use the benchmark test on that one
 
WoW can't be used to stress test benchmarks as it's a very low-tech game compared to pretty much everything else out there.
 
WoW can't be used to stress test benchmarks as it's a very low-tech game compared to pretty much everything else out there.

Yeah but there are certain areas of the game where there can be some slow down in certain areas where there is alot going on.

Like i said, i will stress test with a different game.
 
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