How do you guys feel about the current state of overclocking?

[SPL Tech]

Your numbers are wrong. You cant compare your OC with the TurboBoost OC because you're comparing OC to OC. You need to compare to the stock speed, in which it's about a 30% OC on all the chips. So it's not that overclocking has gotten worse, it's that Intel has more aggressively started pushing OEM overclocking on their products and so they are taking a lot of the skill and work out of the picture by just overclocking the chips at the factory.

However, when it comes to GPUs overclocking has gotten way worse. Nvidia cripples the BIOS settings so aggressively that you cant do jack. You can still get a VERY solid overclock on memory. 50% of the FPS gain comes from overclocking the memory on the card. However, core is much more limited due to the magical 1.09v limitation in the BIOS. This has been done to make overclocking a marketing scam. Like brand 1 has a higher stock OC than brand 2 so now they can charge $300 more for their card even though there is only like a 2 FPS difference between the two. Like, if you look at the absolute top of the line 2080Ti and compare it to the cheapest 2080Ti, the price difference is basically double, but the performance increase is maybe 10% and you'd clearly be much better served by just going SLI on the cheaper card.

What is perplexed me is that no one has found a way to crack the Nvidia encryption on their BIOSes. I mean, literally every software program out there has been cracked and can be found on the Internet with key generators and such. Not sure why the Nvidia BIOS cant be cracked.

 

[>HyperlogiK<]

Overclocking is a shrinking niche, for all of the reasons stated above and because of the continuing decline of the desktop PC. Since it's now far from routine to own a desktop of any sort (let alone one which happens to be tweaking/overclocking friendly) an increasing proportion of PC gamers and/or hardware enthusiasts are justifying the purchase on the basis of it being a dual/multi use machine. My sig is wildly out of date, but almost all of the machines listed were built primarily for the latest big FPS title. Losing a small measure of general system stability seemed a worthwhile tradeoff when I could pay for a Radeon 9500 and get the performance of a 9700 Pro. I still game a bit, but would much rather crank down some shader settings than lose two days worth of work in Photoshop or Illustrator or even a hobby music project.

I realise that this is partly down to my becoming an old fart, but enthusiast desktop PCs are an industry more analogous to wristwatches than smartphones. Sure you can drop $30,000+ on one and impress most of your friends, and there are plenty of nieches where they will linger, but the majority of kids which give a damn about Nvidia silicon only do so because it's what powers the Switch. I'm not predicting the imminent death of PC gaming, but the gradually dwindling enthusiasm for it's more extreme excesses will probably kill off such things as serious overclocking and turning your case into a Christmas decoration before too long. Maybe that's a good thing too; there are a lot of education themed SBCs, FPGAs, etc available for relatively little money these days and perhaps it's better that more kids devote their tech tinkering in the direction of building something new and novel rather than endless tinkering with the BIOS on a 440BX board.

*Typed whilst on the verge of falling asleep, so apologies in advance if the above makes no sense at all.

 

[Janus67]

I don't really think that PC gaming is necessarily going anywhere I just think the amount of tweaking that is needed is going to decrease by a large amount.