Overclocking.. why?

[BlacknTan]

Okay, I warned you all when I signed on that I might have an inane question or two, so here goes...

It seems to me in my reading that folks seem to overclock their PCs for the joy of overclocking itself.. Is it a competitive pastime, even if it's just for your own personal best? Do you do mundane PC chores on your OC machines, or is the high performance machine just for OCing or gaming?
And, now for the 64 Thousand Dollar question (I'm showing my age here), since alot of you gents are pretty accomplished, and quite knowledgable, do various chip manufacturers reach out to you for your input and data when they're designing new processors?

Thanks for the insight..

 

[jamesriley94]

I think the main thing about it is - would you rather spend more money to get better performance, or overclock and get extra performance for free?

I don't think it's that competitive for the average user.
When we get our chips - most of us will see what they're capable of - as the signatures show.

I'm not too sure if companies like Intel would really ask us our opinions of things? I'm not too sure what people are going to say either - they want a better performing chip, that's more energy efficient and runs as cool as possible.

Not any secret that market research could help a company that large to find out - it's just getting the right balance of those 3 I suppose - which is kind of a mute(ish) point anyway since there's such a massive selection of processors (i3, i5, i7 etc) and all differences within the 3 categories as well... and that's only 1 company too...

 

[Josh Weston]

It's like tweaking your car's engine to perform faster. You get more performance for free, but you have to pay more for it to run. Precisely the same for overclocking.

As for the user feedback; Intel employ some of the smartest people in the world - the stuff they do is nothing short of witchcraft. There is nothing we could suggest that would be better than they already do

 

[SnW]

I do it for Folding At Home....

 

[airdeano]

bill, great question.. do the manufacturers reach-out to us.. not really.
overclocking is like in you genre to develop a quicker tool-path to do the
same job in less time or motion. overclocking (OC) basically give the end-user
an option to "over-drive" the processor to handle more tasks, applications
or speed to accomplish easier. most of the time it is chest-beating, but
most would like to achive a platform best and move on to something stable..
wringing out the best performance a CPU can do is one-thing, running
it 24/7 can be another (and most case is). it is considered the "silicone
lottery" if a chip is a "superchip" or a normal chip. a 3570k might be
able to overclock to 5.3GHz, but can't be stable enough to use browsing
the web. but it could be stable at 4.6GHz (25% increase in speed). so
you paid for 3.4GHz performance, but with some effort you wrangled 25%
increase in computing power.

there can be trade-offs. increased heat from the processor. so
you have to invest in a aftermarket CPU cooler that will handle to extra
heat from the OC. some power comsumption increase is also noted. but
it really depends on what the intentions are as to whether an OC is needed
or not.

airdeano

 

[BlacknTan]

Thanks for the insight, gents.. Although I am a bit surprised that chipmakers don't seek out your data.

Folding... That's another activity I've been reading up on. Something I'd like to try. It makes me feel good to help people in some small way. I've been a blood donor for forty years, and folding sounds like a good thing to do, although I do admit to having a bit of trep[idation in giving another entity access to my computer. But, I have to learn much more about it!

Thanks again..

 

[Technophobe]

I overclock but don't push things to their theoretical limits. I'm the type of guy that's happy with getting cheap processor running like a more expensive processor without spending the extra money.

Works for me but my builds are shamefully ugly and unsophisticated compared to most others on this forum. I'm really looking at other peoples builds at the moment, and deciding whether to mod my old Cosmos or buy a Cosmos II (I don't mind investing heavily in a case when I'll use the same one for up to 5 years)

 

[Master&Puppet]

Mainly I do it because it is fun but I originally started it to get more performance and that is certainly still true today. I suppose I enjoy 'improving' what you can buy because at factory settings hardware really isn't optimised.

I have never been asked for my views on the topic but neither do I think that even the enthusiast market on the whole knows what is good for itself. LLC was a market response to what enthusiasts wanted and I think it's largely pointless or even detrimental to what overclocking is meant to achieve.