Overclocking Series Part 1 of 4: Why should you overclock?

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Written by Ben Rogers, a freelance IT technician from North Devon, England. He has been into computers in a big way for quite a number of years now and loves overclocking, He enjoys tweaking PCs and seeing how fast they can go and benchmarking them too! If you live in the UK, he also has a computer repair service website, at Devon Computer Repair.

What is overclocking?

Per definition, overclocking is the act of raising the frequency(speed) of a part beyond its speed set by the manufacturer.

You may be one of these people who don’t fully understand overclocking and think that it is just a sure fire way of killing components by frying them. While there are some risks involved, if you follow simple precautions which I will talk about in a future post, overclocking is relatively safe for your PC.

What rewards do you get from overclocking?

• Value:

For many people, it is a good way of getting more than what you pay for out of a computer! Some see overclocking as a way to get the performance of higher-end parts by overclocking a lower-end part speed to the one of the higher-end part.

You can achieve a mild overclock for no outlay whatsoever and it can lead to making an older PC that was previously sluggish to a completely usable, faster PC for no cost. It can save you a lot of money, rather than replacing the CPU to a newer, faster one simply overclock your current one for free and get the rewards for doing so.

• Performance:

The rewards from overclocking can be seen from the performance increase your PC will have and it will make it more future proof for the latest games, with a good overclock you can enter the maps in FPS games quicker and start fragging before others if you don’t mind being called a spawn killer! (Mathieu: Reminds me of Counter-Strike 1.6, on awp_map. Shot through walls and being killed at the beginning of the round. Or the other way around.)

Overclocking is a way of getting the maximum performance out of your system without having to spend money on a faster processor or more system memory. If you know what you are doing(If you don’t, stay tuned for Part 2, 3 and 4 to learn more), it is very unlikely you will fry any component.

• Pleasure:

The best thing about overclocking is learning about the different ways of achieving a good overclock, always wanting to push to the limits of your hardware and keeping up with the overclocking scene is fun.

If you’re a speed freak you may be interested in overclocking because you can actually notice the difference in performance from your PC, even with a mild overclock the difference can be amazing and with a moderate to large overclock the difference is amazing especially if you are a gamer or run distributed computing projects!

If you love games running fast with high frame rates overclocking could be right up your street as you can gain a lot of frame rate from a simple overclock with a modern PC.

The performance increase is noticeable to most people who use a PC a lot and can tell the difference, the PC will boot up quicker and will be more responsive when opening multiple applications or resource hungry programs such as Photoshop which require a fast CPU.

• Bragging rights:

  By overclocking a recent PC, you could easily have a PC that is faster than the vast majority of stock(non-overclocked) PC that your friends, family and other have. I know that some of you will enjoy the bragging rights of having one of the, if not the fastest PC in your neighborhood, city, county, state or even the entire country!

  In a similar way to car tuning, with people using NOS, some people will go to extremes to get the fastest PC, as far as using liquid nitrogen to cool their processor and do what is called a “suicide run”, which is basically a try to reach the highest possible speed, take a screenshot of said speed and run some benchmarks to prove the performance of the machine. Note that this is a very dangerous as people use unsafe voltages and the sub-zero temperatures involved can be a source of various problems with the machine.

Conclusion:

That’s it for Part one on Overclocking. I hope that you enjoyed it, that this post made you curious about overclocking and gave you a few reasons to give it a try now!

I invite you to check out the Free Updates page to receive for free Overclocking Part 2, 3, 4 and other great posts from Hardware Revolution as they are published, via your choice of e-mail, RSS or Twitter.