Thread: Processors Overclocked Vs Stock - Really worth it?

Well many would be fascinated by "Overclocking" and how you could make your system go faster at no extra cost. But, how effective is overclocking in a modern day system, lets find out...


The system I have used is my everyday rig, its specifications are as follows:

Core 2 Extreme QX9650 @3.00GHz(stock) @3.6GHz(Overclocked)
ATI 4850 512MB (Core: 925MHz, Memory:993MHz)
4GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800MHz
Corsair VX550 PSU
Cooler Master TX3 CPU cooler
HAF 922 cabinet



Well, a 600Mhz overclock is pretty mild, I can push it far more, but this is pretty much what most will overclock for 24x7 system.

So lets go ahead with the tests now, I have Included both synthetic tests as well as some gaming tests, here are the benchmarks used:

• Wprime
• Everest - CPU Queen & Memory tests
• WinRar
• Crysis Warhead
• X3 Terran
• Stalker - call of Pripyat
• Street fighter IV
  

Wprime:


Wprime is a multi threaded benchmark that benefits from both multiple cores and higher frequencies, so lets see how the system has performed:

Wprime 1024m test scale : seconds

As we can see, clearly overclocking helps here, a significant drop in time is seen.

WinRar



Winrar is a universal compression tool. I have taken the time taken to compress a 1GB file as the benchmark, no internal tool used.



Well, nothing significant here, overclocked settings we just 7 seconds faster, I took an average of 3 runs per setting.



Everest :




Everest Ultimate from Lavalys has many benchmarks, I have used CPU Queen and Memory Read and write tests.

CPU Queen did some some pretty decent gains with overclocking. 25603 points with Overclock and 21290 at stock.

As I had overclocked using the FSB, I wanted to see how it effected the memory performance, hence I ran some memory Read and memory write tests.

Scale : MB/sec

Some small gains seen in both memory benchmarks.

Crysis Warhead


One on the most hardware demanding games out there, lets see how overclocking effects its performance.


Game settings:
Graphics preset: Gamer, DX9
Resolution : 1280x1024
Anti Aliasing: none


Well, no point giving graphs for this, the difference was very negligible:
___________ Min______Max_____Avg
Stock _____ 27.15____49.12 ___36.97
Overclocked_29.67____49.25 ___38.59



X3 Terran


This is a really beautiful game, its setting is in outer space and has some really great graphics.


The settings were all at maxed out, resolution was 1280x1024.These were the average FPS (frames per second) recorded.

Pretty decent gains are seen in this game.



Stalker - call of Pripyat


Its a great game, has some pretty decent graphics too. An automatic benchmark tool was used for this game.

Here are the results with stock settings:

Here are the results with Overclocked settings:

Pretty small gains seen here...nothing significant.



Street fighter IV




Oh yes, the latest of my childhood favorite arcade game street fighter, Street Fighter IV has some decent graphics and since many here may like it too, I just wanted to give it a shot !

Sadly, I saw no difference what so ever when it came to FPS. Both averaged to 64 FPS according to fraps, I guess the game is locked at 64 FPS.

Conclusion:

Well, this is not a very straight forward thing. Some applications benefit from higher CPU clocks than others, and for some, there is no difference at all.

Games are generally more GPU bound than CPU bound, so with a 4850, these results were actually expected, we could have seen far more increase if I had used something like a HD5870. But then, we get into a more common problem.

No one with a high end Quad core and a 5870 will game at low resolutions, where the game is more CPU bound rather than GPU bound and at high resolutions at which you will play the games at, the CPU does not really matter.

So, what I mean is, even if you have a somewhat balanced system, Overclocking may NOT really effect your gaming experience much, even if you get a few extra FPS.

Well, there always a downside of overclocking. Overclocking generally makes the CPU run hotter than it would run at stock and it may effect the life time of a CPU, which according to me is not that big an issue. The other "trade off" is power consumption. When you increase the core voltage during overclocking, your system consumes more power than at stock settings, it could range anywhere from 20W on a mildly overclocked machine to 100W+ on an extreme system overclock.


I hope this article has cleared some of your queries on how effective CPU overclocking really is, if you have any questions, feel free to ask below.

This article is 100% based on my own knowledge/ideas/ and not copied/from anywhere. Any similarity is incidental and accidental. Use of this article for commercial purposes prohibited without written consent/agreement from me , the sole Copyright holder !!!!!!

Great thread dude...................
Now I cannot rep, but will definitely when I can

Great thread!
I also cannot rep you (will surely do it later).

P.S: I am just a soft-core gamer.

great thread rajan!

Rep+

You didnt mention about your motherboard in your PC config?

gigabyte G31 ES2L

Hmmmm!! :-) any plans of upgrading the PC?

ask parminder jee first, any plans of a contest that I can win



No bro, not now, probably at the end of the year, just a GPU upgrade that too, no real need as of now.

I hate what intel is doing, changing sockets and all! Atleast AMD still has AM3!!

GPU upgrade is the best possible you can do!