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Is Overclocking Over?
MrSeb writes "Earlier this week, an ExtremeTech writer received a press release from a Romanian overclocking team that smashed a few overclocking records, including pushing Kingston's HyperX DDR3 memory to an incredible 3600MHz (at CL10). The Lab501 team did this, and their other record breakers, with the aid of liquid nitrogen which cooled the RAM down to a frosty -196C. That certainly qualifies as extreme, but is it news? Ten years ago, overclocking memory involved a certain amount of investigation, research, and risk, but in these days of super-fast RAM and manufacturer's warranties it seems a less intoxicating prospect. As it becomes increasingly difficult to justify what a person should overclock for, has the enthusiast passion for overclocking cooled off?"
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In the days of the 300MHz Celeron, you could overclock it to 450MHz and gain 50% improvement. That extra 150MHz represented several hundred dollars straight to Intel, which you kept in your pocket by overclocking. These days, a few percent? It's just not worth the trouble any more.
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I think CPU speed is less of an issue these days; eg Core2 onwards processors are generally "fast enough" for most users.
Compare the change in noticeable speed between a 386 and 486, or even Pentium vs Pentium 2 or 3, to today's Core2/Athlon vs Core i5/Phenom.
Most people don't notice the jump in CPU performance on modern processors.
The other traditional bottlenecks are rapidly disappearing too, eg a midrange Directx10 graphics card is good enough to play all but the most demanding games these days, and memory and disk speed and capacity are generally outpacing most people's demand.
People will still overclock for the challenge of it, but I think there's no tangible day-to-day benefit anymore.
As someone above mentioned, the real performance battle has moved to portable devices, eg how much performance can you get from a tablet or phone, given a fixed battery capacity?
I think you're right. I've overclocked my i5 750 from 2.66 to 3.15, and the speed increase is.. well hard to spot. In benchmarks I certainly see it. It was much easier to do than in the good old days where it was jumper settings.
I think the gist of it, at least for me, is that there's fun in it anymore. I have relatively high end gear, at least at time of purchase, and it all basically guides you to overclocking. It's not as bad ass as it used to be.
This may be a bit biased since I now have much larger sum of disposable income compared to when I was overclocking.
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