Wednesday, August 09, 2006
What is Overclocking?
Psuhing the limits of your hardware past manufacturer specific specifications in order to extract the maximum performance from your system is called overclocking. For the time being noobs, can consider it as simply increasing the clock speed or the amount of MHz.
eg: If you have a 2GHz CPU and you want to run it at 2.2GHz, then you need to overclock it.
This is what might have happended to a limited extent:
Years ago manufacturers made a lower number of pieces of hardware as the sale was not very high. So obviously they would see what was the maximum performance or speed that hardware could be specific to give. When the limit arrived and they found it stable enough, they would sell it. But with increase in sales, you need to decrease the prices which means cost price also decreases or the effort devoted to each piece has to be decreased in order to maintain profits. So the product will be clocked to a certain speed without adequate testing. This means that there is a chance that the potential of the product is much more, hence we conclude with overclocking.
However now things are quite a bit different. Companies purposely make their products overclockable and infact sell with that tag in order to increase their sales. However it is possible that higher models may have more features for overclocking so that people don't stop buying the higher models all together.
If you truthfully ask me it is possible to turn a mainstream CPU to a high end one simply by overclocking it. In my opinion a highly overclocked Amd 64 3000 Venice can beat a FX 53 and even come close to the FX 55.
Just play it safe while overclocking and keep yourself within the safe margin and most often than not, nothing wrong should happen. Obviously overclocking does reduce the life of your CPU, but it is not that you are any way going to use it for more than 1-3yrs.
*Please keep in mind that overclocking does void warranty. I am not responsible for any tips or suggestions or any piece of knowledge that you have learnt from my forum or I have told you. You are overclocking completely at your own risk. However you must keep in mind that if you overclock with care, nothing should go wrong whereas there can be a situation where a person doesn't overclock at all, has top notch hardware yet his system blows up.
eg: If you have a 2GHz CPU and you want to run it at 2.2GHz, then you need to overclock it.
This is what might have happended to a limited extent:
Years ago manufacturers made a lower number of pieces of hardware as the sale was not very high. So obviously they would see what was the maximum performance or speed that hardware could be specific to give. When the limit arrived and they found it stable enough, they would sell it. But with increase in sales, you need to decrease the prices which means cost price also decreases or the effort devoted to each piece has to be decreased in order to maintain profits. So the product will be clocked to a certain speed without adequate testing. This means that there is a chance that the potential of the product is much more, hence we conclude with overclocking.
However now things are quite a bit different. Companies purposely make their products overclockable and infact sell with that tag in order to increase their sales. However it is possible that higher models may have more features for overclocking so that people don't stop buying the higher models all together.
If you truthfully ask me it is possible to turn a mainstream CPU to a high end one simply by overclocking it. In my opinion a highly overclocked Amd 64 3000 Venice can beat a FX 53 and even come close to the FX 55.
Just play it safe while overclocking and keep yourself within the safe margin and most often than not, nothing wrong should happen. Obviously overclocking does reduce the life of your CPU, but it is not that you are any way going to use it for more than 1-3yrs.
*Please keep in mind that overclocking does void warranty. I am not responsible for any tips or suggestions or any piece of knowledge that you have learnt from my forum or I have told you. You are overclocking completely at your own risk. However you must keep in mind that if you overclock with care, nothing should go wrong whereas there can be a situation where a person doesn't overclock at all, has top notch hardware yet his system blows up.
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