Overclocking

[Vaporeon 189]

Only if I need to. I've overclocked CPU's in the past when running emulators with high requirements or video encoding and just use stock clocks if I don't really need it. as for GPU's I've done it once and it did not run right and have never bothered since.

[Skeezix the Cat 3,089]

Yes, although in recent years I've become less desperate to wring every little Hertz I can due to being able to just get better hardware from the start.  I'm quickly approaching the point where I'm actually satisfied with how much horsepower I have without the need to stress everything to the limit.

[Kavawuvi 7,026]

Yes, although in recent years I've become less desperate to wring every little Hertz I can due to being able to just get better hardware from the start.  I'm quickly approaching the point where I'm actually satisfied with how much horsepower I have without the need to stress everything to the limit.

Yeah. I've never really seen the need for the more extreme overclocking that can only be sustained with liquid cooling. For what little you gain, you sure get a lot of heat and a lot more power being devoured, plus a risk of instability.

 

Really, good enough is good enough. When it comes to gaming, even today's locked quad-core i5s and i7s are well more than enough for most people, even on the most demanding titles. They're quite fast, and you're far more likely to upgrade the graphics card before the CPU shows its age, and even graphics cards can take quite a bit of time to do that. Of course, overclocking may be nice for improving longevity a few generations down, or for improving CPU-bound tasks in non-gaming scenarios such as rendering. It's clearly not for everyone.

[Skeezix the Cat 3,089]

Stability is my focus now.  I can max anything at 2560x1440 so now the most annoying thing to me are crashes.  I got a poor quality 5820k, which was expected as it was used and most likely from some overclocker that bought a lot trying to get good chips and sold the bad ones.  At first I could sit at 4.3GHz, then one day my system decided it didn't want to boot.  I couldn't just lower it to 4.2GHz, I had to reset everything and start over.  Gradually I got pushed down to 4GHz and that was finnicky.  Then I actually studied how to overclock Haswell-E and got it to run at 4.4GHz for a few months.  Then it rapidly started throwing fits again if I dare go higher than 4 flat.  One of these days I'm gonna update my damn BIOS and maybe that will make it less squirrely.

[Kavawuvi 7,026]

Today, I overclocked my GTX 1070 (it's a MSI Gaming 8G with the default Gaming BIOS).

 

Processor core is overclocked to 2139 MHz (+216 MHz) at 1.093 V (+100%) while the VRAM is 4004 MHz (+0 MHz).

 

Yes, I tried overclocking the VRAM, but I only got a significant benefit at +200 MHz, which passed the benchmark, but failed when I opened a video file, but not before purple boxes everywhere, then going to black, then returning with sections of my screen jumbled around, then going to black, then doing that again but with white and grey boxes flashing everywhere, then BSODing. Basically, the VRAM is not having anything with it, which is a shame, as it improved Unigine Heaven (DX11) benchmarks by 2% and 3DMark Time Spy (DX12) benchmarks by 3%. I'm satisfied, though.

 

Voltage is only a slider between 0% and 100%, as this architecture (apparently) doesn't allow for an exact voltage offset. This isn't a bad thing, but that means it only allows the card to run at a higher voltage rather than actually offset the card's voltage, and it may run at lower voltages before working up to higher voltages. This means I have to modify a voltage curve (ctrl+F in MSI Afterburner) instead of specifying a direct offset, as an overclock that works at 1.093 V can fail when the card is running at 1.050 V, crashing Unigine Heaven right after it opens (it only crashes the application - I don't need to reboot or anything).

 

Who wants some graphs?

Spoiler

 

Basically: Not much improvement, but at least I know how far I can take this card.

 

[Kavawuvi 7,026]

Does anyone actually care about factory overclocking?

 

Spoiler

When I got my graphics card, there were two models of the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming 8G cards on sale: the Gaming and the Gaming X. The Gaming X was about $20 more but featured a slightly higher factory overclock (about 63 MHz higher to the boost and base speeds). I got the regular Gaming, and I'm happy with it.

 

Today, I wanted to see what difference a factory overclock makes, so I benchmarked it on Yooka-Laylee with the factory OC, the Gaming X's factory overclock (simulated, but it has the same cooler and GPU-Z reports the same exact speeds as MSI's specs), as well as with my overclock and with reference speeds. The clock speeds are recorded with MSI Afterburner, because GPU Boost will boost your card higher if you have voltage and thermal headroom (the card never went above 70 C in either benchmark, so it always boosted to the max on the voltage/speed curve).

 

 

Yes, there's a measurable frame rate increase, and that should be expected if the clock speed is higher, and there's no CPU bottleneck (it's being run at 4K!). When you compare the Gaming speeds versus the Gaming X speeds, there's very little difference to speak of. If you look at the minimum frame rate, the only thing that made a significant impact was when I overclocked the GPU and RAM as high as they'd go before any sort of artifacting or crashing occurs, and this didn't cost anything except less than an hour of my time.

 

Comparing the Gaming vs Gaming X, they use the same GTX 1070 GPU and the Twin Frozr VI cooler, and I got a pretty good GPU core overclock for free anyway. All I'd have paid $20 extra for is the stock speed bump, which IMO isn't worth it. In fact, the difference between them was so small, I used the Gaming's stock voltage when simulating the Gaming X and nothing bad happened.

 

The way I see it: there's little point in spending extra for factory overclocks, even if one wasn't going to overclock. Most of the cards out there are factory overclocked, anyway, and as long as you have decent cooling, you're going to get a good boost speed, and the difference in performance is way too small to justify spending extra. For people who do overclock, the overclocking headroom isn't any different (at least with my card), so I think the best option is to just get the cheapest card that doesn't have a crappy cooler.

 

[ShikuTeshi 1,299]

I don't see any value in it. But then again I'm someone who's a little bit more comfortable with overclocking.

 

I can see some people who don't like taking unnecessary risks and going for the extra juice out of the box.

[Kavawuvi 7,026]

39 minutes ago, ShikuTeshi said:

I don't see any value in it. But then again I'm someone who's a little bit more comfortable with overclocking.

 

I can see some people who don't like taking unnecessary risks and going for the extra juice out of the box.

I can see some people wanting extra performance without doing anything, but the value proposition is very poor, as one would be paying another $20 for maybe 1-2% more performance? You'd be better off buying the next tier graphics card.

 

And yes, if you run a GPU out of spec, even without doing any BIOS flashing and just using MSI Afterburner or something, there's always some sort of risk, even if it's highly improbable. If you're not okay taking that risk and are fine not getting the most out of what you paid for your card, then you shouldn't overclock. Personally, I'm quite comfortable with taking the voltage and power limit all the way to the right in MSI Afterburner and seeing how fast the card goes. Yes, it runs a little warmer. It may also not last as long, though it's not going to run at that voltage and speed 24/7 - a couple hours at a time, at most.

[Takka 13,376]

I don't care for it, no, but all of them are factory overclocked these days it seems.

[Kavawuvi 7,026]

51 minutes ago, Tucker933 said:

I don't care for it, no, but all of them are factory overclocked these days it seems.

It does seem factory overclocks are (ironically) pretty standard. Unless you buy a reference/FE card or you get something like an EVGA FTW DT, you're probably going to get at least a slight factory overclock if it has so much as a logo on it. In a way, this is another reason why there really isn't much of a point to pay extra for factory overclocks.