Overclocking for Dummies
Posted by By Jon Peddie and Ted Pollak on November 25th 2010 | Discuss
Categories:
Hardware Review
Tags:
amd
cpu
overclock
3dmark
hd4870
I have always been reticent to mess with overclocking (OC) processors for fear of ruining something and reduced stability. However since I have separated my business and benchmarking computers the stability part of the equation is not as important anymore. After reading an article in PC Aviator, the author discloses that he has been overclocking CPUs for many years and he has never actually hurt a chip. Blue Screens, yes he gets those when the OC is too aggressive but it’s always as simple as tuning it down in the BIOS until the system runs stably.
We cannot officially recommend overclocking due to question marks on warranty, but I for one, have been sold on its benefits and have no fear of ruining processors. What gives me this confidence to a higher degree is a motherboard that is designed for enthusiasts. They are made for overclocking and usually have extra heat sinks on the North Bridge and South Bridge as well as a BIOS that was created with overclocking in mind.
What drove me to seek out more performance was one particular game, ARMA 2. This “game” was designed to run on government super computers and can bring even the most powerful CPU and GPU to its knees. ARMA 2 is known as a “CPU bound” game meaning that the performance delta has traditionally been higher on CPU upgrades vs. GPU upgrades. However we are running tests right now and faster GPUs do help the title perform as well.
I don’t have the patience or time, or frankly the interest in micro managing all of the clock speeds and voltages so I decided to use the “canned” OC settings included in the BIOS, which set all these parameters for you. These canned settings I refer to as “overclocking for dummies” though dummies could be substituted with “time pressed” or “disinterested”. I should note that manually tweaking versus using the canned settings can sometimes yield superior results.
It’s a good idea to check your temperatures after any overclock and I can recommend an excellent small program called Core Temp which is a free download (www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/). Below are tests that I ran on two systems. I used the free version of 3DMark06 and recorded the full score (though the CPU was the only thing overclocked). I used decent cooling solutions; however there are high level cooling solutions would bring the temps down dramatically. The ambient temperature during the tests was 28 degrees Celsius. Amongst overclockers there seems to be a general agreement that anything over 80 degrees Celsius is not optimal and CPUs will start protecting themselves somewhere over 90.
Overclocking for Dummies Test System #1
The first system I tested OC is an Intel Core Duo Quad Extreme QX9650 3.00 GHZ with two HD4870’s in Crossfire, 4 Gigs of RAM, and a high performance Intel air cooler.
The 3DMark score increased an impressive 16% (from 16,161 to 18,748) using the max canned OC setting of 3.5 GHZ and temperatures did not exceed 56 degrees. That is almost perfect scaling sicne the clock was also increased 16.6%. That would indicate the CPU clock, and not the memory or memory bandwidth is the limiting factor in improved performance.
Overclocking for Dummies Test System #2
The second system I tested is an Intel Xeon W3570, GTX 480, and 5 Gigs RAM. Some Xeon’s I’ve been told are locked down but this one was overclockable. We used a Corsair H50 liquid cooler for the CPU.
The 3DMark score jumped approximately 15% (from 21,854 to 25,468) using the max canned OC of 4.00 GHZ but temps got up to 73 degrees. I noticed that the 3DMark CPU test really gets the chip cooking so I recorded temps during high CPU load gaming and it ran at a much more comfortable 61 degrees during with the 4.00GHZ OC. Here the results did not scale linearly, with a clock increase of 25% we only saw a 15% benchmark score increase.
Conclusion
There are very few office applications that would reward an overclock. However simulation gamers, people who render in 3D, and video editors can benefit substantially from overclocking. The setting is easily adjustable in the BIOS of good motherboards. It is easy enough that I normally run these rigs at stock settings to save power, and when I want to use an intensive application as mentioned above I just reboot with the OC.
