£800 Gaming Build

[alienware]

LMFAO £800 gaming build, but with no OC. We're all completely thrown through a loop because of ''no OC'' xPP

I'd +1 the matx idea with a low end B75 board (The MSI one - but that's personal preference), a i5 non-k, a 7970/670, ~ 550w PSU... along those lines

You'd be surprised just how many people have gaming systems that they don't overclock.

It isn't because I don't know how to do it tbh it's more the fact that I question what it does to your hardware in the long term. At launch people were putting crazy voltages through Sandybridge to achieve 5ghz overclocks. No one realised at that time just how bad that was for a 32nm chip. As time went on the overclocks on it slowly lowered to around 4.5ghz which is also what has been used for the Ivy ones.

However, I have seen a good few cases of overclocked systems failing and falling way short of their life span due to overclocking.

I did used to overclock my stuff but I got tired of the way my PC behaved. Every now and then I would get failure at post and a message saying my bios settings had been restored to default. This was with an overclock that would run PRIME stable for two days or more.

Then there are the issues where you get a strange BSOD in certain games which you come to find are being caused by the overclocks, even when you thought everything had been tested stable.

It's probably down to my age now but I just CBA overclocking any more. I'd rather get the best hardware I can afford and then prolong the lifetime by treating it as it was intended instead of trying to get it to cough its lungs out through its mouth.

 

[SPS]

I'd prefer to have a bench rig just for OCs TBH. I don't run my main rig OC'd most of the time because I can't afford for it to be unstable and BSOD mid way through development. Even after 12hrs Prime stable my PC would still BSOD under certain circumstances

 

[alpenwasser]

I'd prefer to have a bench rig just for OCs TBH. I don't run my main rig OC'd most of the time because I can't afford for it to be unstable and BSOD mid way through development. Even after 12hrs Prime stable my PC would still BSOD under certain circumstances

I somewhat second that (depending on one's situation). My new rig will be running
BOINC and I recently read quite an extensive article where they tested the
results of OC'd chips against the results of stock chips and even underclocked
ones.

The overclocked chips, even when running perfectly stable, tended to produce
quite a bit of errors and therefore unusable results, and even some of the
stock chips did so.

So yeah, if I overclock, it will be mildly. And I don't think I'll ever make fun of
people for not doing it, especially when you need to do work on your rig and
reliability as well as dependability are key.

 

[alienware]

I'd prefer to have a bench rig just for OCs TBH. I don't run my main rig OC'd most of the time because I can't afford for it to be unstable and BSOD mid way through development. Even after 12hrs Prime stable my PC would still BSOD under certain circumstances

Don't get me wrong I'm not anti-overclock. I find it fascinating tbh. I just prefer to watch other people doing it, it's cheaper :lol:

I overclocked loads of CPUs over the years. First real forray into it was with the Pentium 66. Then I got a Celeron 300A and the trick was to set the FSB to 100mhz instead of the stock 66mhz which ended you up with a 450mhz P2 for 1/3 the price

Obviously I moved onto the Athlon XP which was a terrific overclocker. Real easy way of getting the top chip performance for mid range cash.

I also overclocked my last Core 2 Duo. Got some sick clocks out of that.

Only been for the past two years I've stopped it tbh. All that faffing and fiddling is beyond me now

 

[grassman]

It's not as significant as it was back in those days as now we are being held back by current not moving quickly enough.