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The Overclocking Addiction

06.07.06 - 10:03pm

People speak of overclocking all the time but rarely do people specify why they do it. I am sure there are some people that would love to overclock but the risks seem too great. Then there are those people out there that only know of overclocking as some underground computer scene. Since I am such an avid overclocker I have decided to share some of my passion with you in this unusually personal article.

Now that I have indicated my audience, time to draw a few lines and separate the crowd.. Overclocking definitely isn’t for everyone. For this article let’s pretend we live in a perfect world where every motherboard has support for overclocking, including that Dell you own. Now in this perfect world there will be a few situations where overclocking would be impractical. Laptops are a prime example. Overclocking pushes out more heat and sucks up more power, definitely not what you need in a laptop. Critical servers are another perfect example. Overclocking tends to stress components to near their breaking point, which can cause major problems in key servers. Imagine if a server at Wachovia misplaced the decimal on a bank transaction so instead of depositing $1500.00 you deposit $15.00. Ouch. Computers that live in quiet environments would also gain nothing from overclocking. Since you will now be pushing out more heat, your processor fan will spin up faster and make more noise. So how about those computers that sit in a recording studio for example, do you want to hear the whirring of a fan in the recordings? Probably not. In my mind, those three categories are immediately ruled out; laptops, servers, special environments computers.

What is there to gain?

So if you haven’t been ruled out yet, let’s see what you can gain. To start, when I purchase a new computer I specifically buy a middle-range to budget-range processor. These processors tend to have lots of headroom for overclocking. Take for example the single core Pentium 4’s. If you buy a 3.8GHz processor, hitting anything above 4.5 could be a struggle with insufficient cooling. However if you purchase a 3.2GHz processor, you are almost guaranteed that you can hit 3.8GHz. I say almost guaranteed because this same processor design is already capable of operating at 3.8GHz. You know this because Intel sells a 3.8GHz Pentium 4. When manufacturing chips they manufacture one chip and then “speed bin” the chips to various speeds. So if you luck out, you can hit 3.8GHz guaranteed. Now following this logic, you technically can purchase a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 for $210 and push it to 3.8GHz which would cost you $607. If you can pull this off you have saved yourself nearly $400, looking good right?

Now that you have gained 600MHz and saved $400 what else can you gain? If you thought that gaining 600MHz was fun perhaps you could turn that into a hobby. Why stop at 3.8GHz. With most processors under proper cooling you can easily pull 30%-40% overclocks given the proper equipment. So instead of just 3.8GHz how does 4.5GHz sound? Since Intel doesn’t even sell a 4.5GHz processor, you are now gaining a considerable boost over stock speeds. So now let’s say you have a 4.5GHz processor, what is new? In your regular desktop activities you might notice a few things go by faster. Zipping and unzipping files goes a little faster, if you encode media that’ll go by faster, but in general nothing amazing is going to happen.

But what if you perform some computer intensive tasks? If you run simulations, distributed computing, or game with this computer you will notice a significant increase in performance. Simulations will complete faster, you will crunch numbers faster, and you will get more frames per second. Chances are along with that processor overclock you will also gain a little bit of memory bandwidth which never hurts. So free performance traded in for some extra heat and electricity consumption. In my book that is more than a good trade.

What you lose

Nobody likes hearing bad news but you have to face it. I would equate overclocking to putting forced induction on a car and then tweaking the boost a bit. While the performance is great there is always the risk of that engine blowing up on you. Processors are just the same, while the performance might be great you are still pushing those circuits a little harder than normal. Because of this extra strain you always have the chance of permanently damaging a gate somewhere in that chip. Since there are millions of gates, you can see how bad it can get. However don’t freak out, most processors are very resilient. I have had my current processor running at 2.8Ghz at 100% for the last 4 months and it has never crashed. Since the processor came from the factory at 2.0GHz, I am successfully running a 40% overclock and it is very stable.

Besides the risk of toasting your chip you have to deal with the increased heat production and electricity. The electricity won’t be too bad considering it’ll be a few dollars more dollars a month but the heat can become an issue. If you haven’t got a sufficient heatsink then your processor will bake with the increased heat and start removing years of life. This might not be an issue though considering how the average processor has an estimated lifetime of around 10 years so losing 3 years might not be that bad. But I always say a cool processor is a happy processor, would you like to live in a box at 80* Celsius? I would hope not.

Is it for me?

Chances are overclocking is something you have contemplated and figured it wasn’t for you. I would only suggest overclocking if you are willing to lose everything. I do it because my computer components were relatively cheap and I always have a backup computer that is ready to go if my main machine fails me. Overclocking can be a great hobby to pick up though especially if combined with a community. I personally love the overclocking community at XtremeSystems.org along with their distributed computing community. Only with a community does your 100% overclock sound amazing or your 11.4GB/s of memory bandwidth count for anything. Imagine trying to tell your parents that you hit 7.2GHz with your Pentium 4. Exactly.

Here are a few relevant links that you might find interesting if this is something you wish to pursue.

Basic Overclocking
Memory Overclocking
Computer Cooling
Extreme Computer Cooling
Distributed Computing
XtremeSystems.org Rosetta Forum
XtremeSystems.org World Record Database
As always if you have any questions feel free to ask.

Category: Articles, Overclocking