Overclocking

Judging from the forums name the question am about to ask may have an answer inclined in favour of one side probably because everyone here does it.
I'll try to make you understand where am coming from before asking it.

Am the kind of person who will go for the best optimal settings (Overclock/performance/watt/cost ratio be it the cpu,cooler or graphics card) and not the maximum possible settings as they may not turn out to be the best. Am strongly inclined to gaming and occassional video editting/conversion. I have overclocked my cpu, compared sythetics to stock clocks and thats just as far as it goes.

I havent really seen real world applications especially games really benefiting from overclocking as much as just upgrading the graphics card. When it comes to video editing/conversion overclocking seems to chop of some minutes, say if it was taking 25min to convert a 4.7gb dvd to .rm or rmvb, it just knocks off 7min.

I would like some realife experiences and not predictive thoughts when responding to the question. To really understand my plight this guy called billin30 here would understand where am coming from.

Alot of his member responses are not really realife experiences but presumptions, his question emanates from a realife experience. There are 16 responses in that post but about 5 address his question directly.

Am sure you may be wondering, I have been a member this long here and all over sudden I dont seem to understand why overclock. The simple reason is a friend of mine visited me, saw my air cooler heatsink, researched about its performance on the net and finally yesterday bought it from me. So what happened? I was forced to return to stock settings as I have been on overclock settings all the time. It is after returning to stock settings that I noticed little difference.

I thought overclocking is supposed to benefit greatly in real world as or just about synthetics. I dont mind one taking their time to answer this question. I'll read through your response just as you have read through my question to this bit. Just where is overclocking applicable and worth the trouble?

I cant tell about the STOCK performance of my sytem. I never ran it stock ( installed windows stock but thats all ... ).

I personnally love to see 3.8ghz on mu G15 screen ... nice temps, nice WC kit. its like tuning your car, why would you stick a turbo or anythiing to gain performance when you can go fast on roadz. You can go to the local track and do sime time attack but as soon as you go back to the street its back to normal use. Its the same for your computer ! you OC it .. run it gently when gaming and something you run a benchmark just tu know how far it can go.

I love to OC, i see lil gain in FPS, great gain in benchmark. I dont encode/decode so i cant tell for those.

have fun !

Boulard83 said:

I cant tell about the STOCK performance of my sytem. I never ran it stock ( installed windows stock but thats all ... ).

I personnally love to see 3.8ghz on mu G15 screen ... nice temps, nice WC kit. its like tuning your car, why would you stick a turbo or anythiing to gain performance when you can go fast on roadz. You can go to the local track and do sime time attack but as soon as you go back to the street its back to normal use. Its the same for your computer ! you OC it .. run it gently when gaming and something you run a benchmark just tu know how far it can go.

I love to OC, i see lil gain in FPS, great gain in benchmark. I dont encode/decode so i cant tell for those.

have fun !

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Thank you I appreciate your honesty

hmm as with the couple of replies in the other forum and as said by Boulard83 too, i dont see a visible difference or a huge improvement due to Ocing.

I use Photoshop, lightroom and a Pano software (PTGUI), stitching a huge pano, although its a bit memory and CPU intensive, it was only a couple of seconds improvement from the stock of 2.8Ghz vs 3.6Ghz.

But the reason i do is just for the fun of it and as a learning process, its quite interesting to change the params, learn why i do it, learn the dependencies, and the excitement of changing something and making it run something other than at default. At least helps for a tea time talk

First off... you're asking a very BROAD question, in a confined forum subgroup. You would get better response in a general posting area.
People overclock for many reasons, and it is a personal decision for every person that does it. The added performance of overclocking is used by some people, but not by others. Personal satisfaction plays a large role. To know that you spent $XXX on a system, overclocked it, and it performs better than a much more expensive system at stock speed. Your personal use will determine whether or not it's actually worthwhile or just satisfying a competitive urge. I'm assuming you're running a Q6600. Is there a specific reason you purchased that processor, or did you buy a quad core, because it was the biggest and baddest at the time? If all you're doing is gaming and "occasional" video rendering, your processor is excessive. You would be better suited running a Dual. Are you going to trade it in, because you only occasionally use the 3rd and 4th cores? Probably not, you like to know that they're there, in case you need them... same with an overclock.

On a personal level, because that is what you asked for, I can see dramatic improvements in Distributed Computing. Say a single work unit that can 18 minutes to complete, takes 12 minutes, once overclocked. That's about a 33% increase in completion time. So now multiply that over 8 cores (I7 with HT) 24 hours a day 7 days a week... 560 completed Work Units per week (stock) vs. 840 completed Work Units per week (overclocked). For me overclocking is a no brainer. You had personal experiences with this yourself. You claimed your conversion time decreased by 7 minutes off of the normal 25. That's a 28% savings in time... imagine if you were doing video conversions all day. If by "real world" you mean web surfing, watching movies, listening to music... all of us could revert back to a pentium 4 and get along just fine.

I've stated this before, and I'm sure I'll do it again, to me there are 2 types of overclockers. Type 1, buys a new system, searches online for people with the same stuff, takes a few of their settings, sets it and forgets it (even though it may or may not be stable)... that's it, they're "Overclocker's" now. Type 2, has an infatuation, and they're the people to you take advice from, look up too, on these forums. An infatuation with how things work, the need to extract every ounce of speed from a combination of parts (whether it's needed or not). The need to stabilize a CPU at twice it's rated speed, the need to find the limits of every single component in their system and make them work together in harmony. They're called Overclocker's, but they're not... they're Pioneer's. When Intel and AMD want to see what they're stuff can do, they look to overclockers. Extreme Overclocker's push the limits, and advance the industry. If it was up to Intel, you would still be using a Pentium 4.

Great post! ^^

^^^ nice reply nzaneb !

I have 2 systems, with similar configurations:

both have 4gb ddr2-800 RAM , and both have Intel e5200

one is overclocked at 4ghz and gets 3090ppd when running folding at home

the other 1 is overclocked to 3ghz and gets 2835ppd when folding

So i have noticed a difference in performance when overclocking.


Im not a gamer, so i dont need to overclock, i do it because i like getting more performance then what i paid for, as other people have said above, its a nice feeling to know that your build is performing as good as, or better than somthing that is more expensive


edit: im in the middle of doing some real word benchmarks, just encoding a 700mb avi to an mpeg using mencoder which i used to do alot when making dvds before i got a media centre pc.

Gona have the ram running as close to 800 as i can get it and do tests at 4ghz.3ghz and 2.5ghz to see how how much time overclocking saves.

edit1:

Here is the results of me encoding the video file.

During the tests, i had 2 terminals running (1 for top, and 1 for mencoder) , and 1 copy of mousepad to store the results after mencoder had finished.


The results are pretty much self explanitory:

The memory was ran as close to stock speeds as posible by changing the dividers in the bios, and the cpu multi was 12.5 in all runs

Hope this helps answer your questions.

Boulard83 said:

^^^ nice reply nzaneb !

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EarthDog said:

Great post! ^^

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Thanks guys

markp1989 said:

I have 2 systems, with similar configurations:

both have 4gb ddr2-800 RAM , .......

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Nice work markp. Thanks for taking the time to run a few tests. It looks like a fairly linear decrease in time, corresponding directly to the increase in CPU speed. Great example

Going from 333x7 to 425x7 on an E6550 makes windows load faster, programs open faster, multitasking is smoother, encoding video is much faster. I notice a difference.
I also notice a slight FPS increase in all my games. Same goes for clocking up my GPU.

Personally, i have a hard time leaving an adjustable anything alone.
Doing everyday things i notice zero difference between stock and overclocked, but in running folding@home i've found a fairly linear relationship between stock and overclocked. On a day to day basis i run my e5200 at 3.3ghz, as that is as high as it will go on stock volts(1.2 after vdrop), making it one optimal point for heat/speed/lifetime. The other being 2.5ghz 1.08 volts.

As i mentioned before i've never been able to not play with something, for that reason i have a triumph tr7 slowly headed off towards very custom nonsense, and a prelude for a DD. The DD is not, of course, stock. It has the best price/performance mods i could find because as usual, i wanted to fiddle.

On a deeper level though, i have been stricken with the same disease as my dad, i have a terrible and very real addiction to more.
It doesn't matter what it is, it can be ghz, mhz, alcohol, horsepower, whatever, but if i have some, i always want more. It's a fairly dangerous and expensive addiction if it gets away from you, but if you can keep a grip on it and direct it towards useful things, it's ok.
I overclock because it is a free, safe (physically, at least, if not financially) way to indulge in my prime vice, more.




As i type this i've been running 3dmark06 and hoping that it doesn't crash, as if it doesn't i'll have a 4870/e8xxx type score out of a 4830/e5200! Only deep freeze to go now...

EDIT:
It made it. 13273 from an e5200 and 4830
Course my CPU won't do more then 320fsb now, where it'd do 345 before... I only had 1.37vcore too
So it goes, guess that's the end of my high vcore adventures

nzaneb said:

On a personal level, because that is what you asked for, I can see dramatic improvements in Distributed Computing. Say a single work unit that can 18 minutes to complete, takes 12 minutes, once overclocked. That's about a 33% increase in completion time. So now multiply that over 8 cores (I7 with HT) 24 hours a day 7 days a week... 560 completed Work Units per week (stock) vs. 840 completed Work Units per week (overclocked). For me overclocking is a no brainer. You had personal experiences with this yourself. You claimed your conversion time decreased by 7 minutes off of the normal 25. That's a 28% savings in time... imagine if you were doing video conversions all day.

Click to expand...

I undermined the 7 min savings I got and had not looked at it on a broader perspective. So in escence the full benefit of overclocking is dependent on whether the application is able to harness it all. Which means not all applications will realize the benefits. Point well taken. Thank you! Infact intrestingly enough my % time saving matches the % overclock... lol,

nzaneb said:

I've stated this before, and I'm sure I'll do it again, to me there are 2 types of overclockers. Type 1, buys a new system, searches online for people with the same stuff, takes a few of their settings, sets it and forgets it (even though it may or may not be stable)... that's it, they're "Overclocker's" now. Type 2, has an infatuation, and they're the people to you take advice from, look up too, on these forums. An infatuation with how things work, the need to extract every ounce of speed from a combination of parts (whether it's needed or not). The need to stabilize a CPU at twice it's rated speed, the need to find the limits of every single component in their system and make them work together in harmony. They're called Overclocker's, but they're not... they're Pioneer's. When Intel and AMD want to see what they're stuff can do, they look to overclockers. Extreme Overclocker's push the limits, and advance the industry. If it was up to Intel, you would still be using a Pentium 4.

Click to expand...

The reason why I need extra cores is because I knew that at some point I would get into encoding/decoding of videos and still want to game smoothly without a hitch. Am also the kind of guy who overclocks and does not want to back off or lower a setting not even for a minute, I just HATE stock settings.

markp1989 said:

I have 2 systems, with similar configurations:

both have 4gb ddr2-800 RAM , and both have Intel e5200

one is overclocked at 4ghz and gets 3090ppd when running folding at home

the other 1 is overclocked to 3ghz and gets 2835ppd when folding

So i have noticed a difference in performance when overclocking.


Im not a gamer, so i dont need to overclock, i do it because i like getting more performance then what i paid for, as other people have said above, its a nice feeling to know that your build is performing as good as, or better than somthing that is more expensive


edit: im in the middle of doing some real word benchmarks, just encoding a 700mb avi to an mpeg using mencoder which i used to do alot when making dvds before i got a media centre pc.

Gona have the ram running as close to 800 as i can get it and do tests at 4ghz.3ghz and 2.5ghz to see how how much time overclocking saves.

edit1:

Here is the results of me encoding the video file.

During the tests, i had 2 terminals running (1 for top, and 1 for mencoder) , and 1 copy of mousepad to store the results after mencoder had finished.


The results are pretty much self explanitory:

The memory was ran as close to stock speeds as posible by changing the dividers in the bios, and the cpu multi was 12.5 in all runs

Code:

Command: 

time /usr/bin/mencoder -oac lavc -aid 1 -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf -ofps 25 -vf expand=652:366:0:6,scale=720:576,harddup -lavcopts threads=2:vcodec=mpeg2video:trell:mbd=2:sc_threshold=1000000000:cgop:vstrict=0:vrc_maxrate=8500:vrc_buf_size=1835:vbitrate=5001:keyint=12:acodec=ac3:abitrate=224:aspect=16/9 -o /home/mark/Desktop/Untraceable/Untraceable_01_01.mpg /home/mark/Desktop/Untraceable.avi

CPU: 4ghz fsb: 320 mem:ddr2-802
real	22m31.725s
user	26m58.411s
sys	0m15.822s


CPU: 3ghz fsb: 240 mem:ddr2-800
real	29m19.425s
user	35m5.529s
sys	0m19.429s



CPU: 2.5ghz fsb: 200 mem:ddr2-800 
real	35m11.189s
user	41m55.849s
sys	0m23.205s

Hope this helps answer your questions.

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This is exactly what I needed atleast you have 2 cores and it still makes a difference.. coool. Your effort has been well appreciated. Thank you.

Bobnova said:

Personally, i have a hard time leaving an adjustable anything alone.

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Thats what has been biting me so hard that I ended up starting this post. Nothing I own that runs on mains power is normal anymore! even my UPS isnt normal - I just had to mod it. I still havent figured out how to overclock an LCD screen or power a motherboard with two identical power supplies. Its like theres two voices either side of me. One says just buy the damn setup and overclock the hell out of it. The other is more pocket friendly and insists on benefits/cost/greeness/longevity of a setup. I also appreciate your experience. I have learnt a thing or two from it. I guess the best for your case would be to find the best highest but not maximum highest settings. Thanks

Theocnoob said:

Going from 333x7 to 425x7 on an E6550 makes windows load faster, programs open faster, multitasking is smoother, encoding video is much faster. I notice a difference.
I also notice a slight FPS increase in all my games. Same goes for clocking up my GPU.

Click to expand...

Quads looooove bandwidth! Its also funny how I have noticed (a day ago) that my games load alittle slower than before but not much change in framerates



To all of you who have taken the trouble to post here. Good news! My crisis is over! Am now off to buy a Prolimatech megahelms and I dont care about my casing I will just re-re-remodify it. It just has to fit, I'll buy suspenders if need be as I await socket 1156 to launch. I cant wait to get an i7 in that socket as they will be tpd 95w and overclock the living hell out of it!

BowlerWC said:

This is exactly what I needed atleast you have 2 cores and it still makes a difference.. coool. Your effort has been well appreciated. Thank you.

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No trouble, glad i can be of help