Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Why? Because I've overc locked, so I'm faster than y'all!
Overclock your smartphone or tablet instead
For me, It's fun and I could care less what some dude did with liquid nitrogen.
First computer, I just used Asus Overclock and felt I got more for my money.
Second computer, I started fiddling with manual settings.
Third computer I pushed it until I couldn't get rid of the heat with air cooling.
Fourth and current computer, water cooled and running awesome (6 cores at 4.3 GHz).
Each time I felt the progress, it's like leveling your character, but the character is you, and the game is real life!
From a gaming perspective (typically one of the big drivers of overclocking), a few factors that might argue "yes, it's over":
1) For quite a few years now, PC games haven't been forcing the kind of upgrade cycle that they did over the previous 20 years. When Crysis appeared in 2007, it was a game that gave many people an "upgrade or don't play it choice". And after that... the industry retreated. Consoles were the primary development platforms at the time and few PC games pushed significantly past the capabilities of the consoles. Not only did we not see any games more demanding than Crysis, but the vast majority of PC games released were substantially less demanding. As a gamer, if you had a PC that could run Crysis well, you did not need an upgrade. This situation lasted 4 years.
2) Performance has become about more than clock-speeds. The main advances in PC gaming technology over the last few years have come from successive versions of directx. You can't overclock a machine with a directx 9 graphics card so that it can "do" directx10. Same goes for dx10/11.
3) As the entry barriers to PC gaming get lower, the average knowledge level of users fall. PC gaming is, in general, easier and more convenient than it has been at any time in the past. Pick up an $800 PC, grab Steam and off you go. If you just want to play games and are using an off-the-shelf PC from a big manufacturer, you don't need to worry about switching around graphics drivers, sorting out hardware conflicts or any of the other little niggles that used to make PC gaming such a "joy". You can even find cases where PC gaming is easier than console gaming; the PS3, with its incessant firmware updates and mandatory installs has taken us a long way from the "insert game and play" roots of console gaming. People who are new to PC gaming just won't be coming from the kind of mindset that even considers overclocking as something you might even remotely want to do.
4) Among "old school" PC gamers, I think there's been a growing recognition that overclocking has its downsides as well. In an economic downturn, when money is tight, you don't necessarily want to go risking a huge reduction in the lifespan of your expensive toys.
That said, there are a couple of factors that might argue the other way (closely connected to the earlier arguments):
1) System requirements are finally on the move again. After years in stasis, 2011 has seen the release of a number of games with equivalent or higher requirements than Crysis. Bulletstorm started the trend, but Battlefield 3 and - to an even greater extent - Total War: Shogun 2 have really started to push the envelope on PC hardware. A lot of developers openly admit to being bored with console hardware. Even though they still get most of their sales from the consoles, they are using the PC to push beyond what they can achieve there, both to get their studio noticed and to get themselves ready for developing for the next round of console hardware.
2) The downturn also means that people feeling a squeeze on their budgets may be looking to get as much bang for their buck in terms of performance as possible. If you think that your new, overclocked PC will last long enough that you will be able to afford a replacement when it does start to give out, then why not take the risk?
Few people have any real need to sacrifice stability for a little more speed. Overclocking is pretty pointless for anyone with a modern CPU.
It used to mean windows would run faster, games would run faster, everything was FASTER MAN!!!!!111one.
But now overclocking for the at home folks is a case of hit a button in your bios, or in some cases a physical button on the motherboard, and it'll do some overclocking for you, automatically. As its become more automated, the news worthy stuff becomes more and more expensive to implement and show off, and so most things are less news worthy and so it appears "overclocking" happens less. In reality I'd expect it happens alot more, and maybe even when people aren't fully aware of what they are doing.
Also systems being so much faster now, generally provide the speed that users require of them, unless they are the kind of users to be pushing systems to overclock simply for the hell of it, like the guys who get in the news. However you don't see these guys then gaming and getting 200fps on these systems, or anything exciting like that anymore. Its simply overclocked, and shown it to be "stable" at said speed. No one ever goes "lets see how many FPS can we get outta this baby now!", its all become very much a concept thing rather than actually running systems at these speeds for any sensible amount of time.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Look, digital electronics are still subject to analog limitations. When you overclock, you squeeze the hysterisis curve, increasing the probability that your chip incorrectly interprets its the state of a particular bit as the opposite value. i.e. you get random data corruption. This is why you eventually start crashing randomly the more you overclock.
While overclocking a chip that has been conservatively binned simply to reduce manufacturing costs but is actually stable at higher clock rates is reasonable, trying to overclock past the design limits is pretty insane if you care at all about the data integrity. Also, you tend to burn out the electronics earlier than their expected life due to increased heat stress.
I never overclock.
Ten years ago, CPU and RAM speed were really big factors in how fast your PC felt. We've spent the last ten years optimising hell out of them, while still using 7200RPM spinning disks (if you're lucky). So, surprise surprise, today disk IO is what limits your PC's performance. Why overclock your RAM? It makes (almost) not difference to your IO speed.
I got a new laptop just over three years ago. It had a 2.4GHz processor. I got my next new laptop a few weeks ago. It has a... 2.5GHz processor. Clock speeds have become almost irrelevant. What makes the new sucker fly is the SSD. Unfortunately, there is no BIOS setting, however risky, to change from disk to SSD.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
That's like saying competitive soccer going broke would impact on EVERYONE EVER from playing soccer with their friends.
Not everyone overclocks to beat a record.
Hell, "overclock" a toaster if you have to. 2 second cold toast anyone? (the best toast)
But really, there are still plenty of things you can overclock to beat records, such as what iB1 mentioned up there, overclock a smartphone or tablet.
Overclock a Beagleboard, or a Raspberry Pi when it comes out, Arduinos. All these compact computers are pretty much sitting around waiting to be hit by the overclocking spirit.
No. Next question.
Seriously though, both Intel and AMD sell multiplier-unlocked CPUs as a feature, and the winners of tests in PC Pro magazine are overclocked by the system builder. You can even buy upgrade bundles pre-overclocked. My latest motherboard came with one-click overclocking software and can adjust the clock speed through a web page while playing a game. Liquid coolers are mainstream. Overclocking is definitely not dead.
A latent existence
"has the enthusiast passion for overclocking cooled off"
Not from my 5.0Ghz Core i7 2600k anyway -- The tools have become better, the mobo are generally better built and more tolerant to punishment (some have 2 Oz copper), the power rails are a LOT more controllable than before, and in general the IC companies that make the power ICs have progressed a lot too in that time, so you can overclock easier, quicker, get better results and in general, extract quite a bit more, without nitrogen.
And, I compile distros all day, to me going from 3.8Ghz max to 5.0Ghz stable (and quiet!) is awesome; make -j10 FTW !
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"...has the enthusiast passion for overclocking cooled off?"
That's like saying, "Do nerds no longer need a proxy for phallic measurement?" As long as there's still testosterone (even if it is minimal in some here) there'll still be people (men mostly) looking to say "We did it first!"
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
You just don't get the overclockers mentality.
Either is all part of the fun adding to the risk or you are getting the most out what you paid for and are still within stable limits.
I don't think many overclockers care about random data corruption unless they blue screen or they turn it off when they need stability.
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?
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
Therefore, I rest my case.
Cheers Arthur a true friend who is missed but still there :)
All cows eat grass!
[Sultry babe walks up]
"Hello, and what do you do?"
[nasal voice]
"I compile distros all day. Yes, did you know that Slackware on average compiles 20% faster than Debian for 64 bit but if I overclock my Core i7 by raising power rail voltage and tweeking the quantum flux capacitor.... hello, where are you going..hello? Hey, come back, did I mention its a 2600K? Hello?"
Don't worry those guys then convince themselves they have a better visual perception than normal people so they don't feel stupid that they paid said 1000's. Much like the audiophile who buys a massively expensive sound system. Anyone asks them the hell why, they subtly (or not so much) imply that they have a hearing range that is far in excess of your standard human, and of course a better appreciation for music anyways :)
PC's are so fast these days for our simple minds there is no longer a need to overclock.
And GET OFF MY LAWN!
Well let me dig up my test results spreadsheet from when I first got my 2500K CPU, times are in seconds to complete my task in Visual Studio 2010, first set of numbers is the system at stock clock, second set is overclocked at 5GHz, during my game development most of my day consists of building the game, loading the game and testing out changes or additions, therefore the reduction from doing that in 32s vs 21s is absolutely huge, even doing code changes that don't require a total rebuild I am waiting 3s less. It may not sound like a lot but when you are focused any time saved is very important, you can only be focused for so long.
build debug from clean 12.9 6.9
built already, go and load all effects and units 8.2 5.6
at title screen all loaded, start medium map 19.6 14.3
modify main.h build load to splash scrn 3.4 2.1
modify main.h load into medium map 31.9 20.9
modify main.h optimal load no sound, small map 16.9 10.3
running in game, modify main.h apply changes 10 6.7
average 14.7 9.5
system is 2500K, C300 SSD, 16GB memory
Not everything is about gaming, I overclocked for faster compiling cycles, and it makes a HUGE difference. And for gaming the market has long figured it out, hence the huge market for overclocking GPUs, you can get custom water blocks, heatsinks, memory coolers, all specifically for video cards. The market for overclocking GPUs dwarfs the market for overclocking CPUs in the yesteryear, people have been overclocking GPUs since they very first came out from 3dfx.
I tend to underclock more often now, to reduce power consumption on my systems. Of course, I don't play any games on my systems, so I am almost never pushing the capabilities of the hardware.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Isn't that the truth! It reminds me of people who still claim that LPs sound better than CDs even though the LP stereo system is a hack that doesn't always reproduce phase properly and the audio before its recorded on an LP has go to through a compressor first to limit the amplitude because of physical restrictions in the offset of the groove and also the high frequency response is limited because the goove simply can't be machined to undulate enough accuratly enough to reproduce them especially at 33rpm closer to the centre of the record. But hey, its analogue so it must be better, right?
For a small proportion of the population (but, possibly, a large proportion of slashdot-ers) a PC is not a platform for doing useful work or serving entertainment, it's a source of "fun" in its own right. In past decades the people who like to play with their computers would be out in the yard, covered in oil, fiddling with a junky old car, or tuning a valve radio. Now they get their satisfaction from squeezing the last few MHz out of their PCs - whether there is any need or use for those few extra cycles, is immaterial.
And for those with a more software bent, than a hardware leaning, there's always OSS - which serves a similar purpose.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
While "low end" chips may be conservatively binned to reduce manufacturing costs, thats really not the whole story at all.
When the highest end chips can be clocked from 3.8 to 4.5ghz and higher using the stock cpu cooler, doesnt it make you wonder why Intel/AMD do not sell any 4.5ghz versions of these chips? Its because the OEM's fuck up case cooling every single time.
If Intel sold a 4.5ghz i7, Dell would still put it into a case with horrible venting and only a single fan that has been poorly placed, and then Intel would be footing the bill for loads of warranty replacements. The reason the i7 980X's cost so much isnt just because Intel was taking advantage of performance enthusiasts irrationality.. its because the Dell's of the world fuck up cooling every single time. The sandy bridge i7's perform nearly as well but run a lot cooler so can survive the harsh conditions the OEM is going to hamstring them into, and THAT is the main reason why they are so much cheaper than the 980X's.
"His name was James Damore."
I'm sure it's more to do with the fact that Intel do not want to advertise a CPU with a TDP of 200W.
I haven't overclocked since I bought an 1.3Ghz AMD Duron around 2002. It didn't have much headroom though to OC. I think I could only get it to around 1.4Ghz and change.
Lately I don't see much use in OCing. Chips are plenty fast enough for almost anything you throw at them today and you can buy faster chips relatively cheap in the next year or so when your current chip is becoming insufficient.
Both the Intel i5-2500k and AMD Phenom II X6 1100T sit around $200. They aren't the fastest on the market, but at around $200 they are cheap any easily fast enough to handle anything you throw at them.
Not sure what you are on about spending $1000 for 25% more performance. I have a cheap $22 CM212+ cooler, that's a pretty far cry from $1000. The gains are absolutely worth it, I have a 2500K that has a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, it's overclocked to 4.5 GHz, or about a 36% increase.
$22 for 36% more performance is absolutely worth it, maybe not for gaming now, but it's definitely useful for other tasks.
Personally, I do a decent amount of encoding video files, and the speed increase is absolutely time saving. I encode roughly 5-6 ~10 min. 1080P videos into H264 a day. The overclocking saves me about 45-50 minutes a day in encoding time. That's nothing to sneeze at.
I not even close to being an audiophile but even I can certainly tell the difference between CD and DVD audio of the same thing. (CD being significantly worse).
Say what? CD is 44Ksamples/sec 16-bit PCM stereo, or about 1500Kbits/sec. DVD stereo audio is usually a Dolby Digital bitstream of 192Kbits/sec, or maybe 384Kbits/sec for 5.1 audio, and usually from a 44Ksamples/sec source. And you say CD sounds worse? Perhaps what you are hearing is the extra channels from 5.1 audio. Or maybe your amp is processing the CD audio differently, like not mixing a center channel, or not doing Dolby Stereo, or maybe even trying to do Dolby Stereo when the source material wasn't recorded with it.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I don't know how it compares to Visual Studio but they complete builds quicker and generates faster machine code than does GCC.
The CLang command-line is mostly GCC compatible. The parser is larger Visual Studio-compatible.
It is also Open Source under a BSD-style license.
A friend gave a talk at Microsoft one day. Upon his return he told me why Windows was so slow. It turns out that all the OEMs - Dell, Gateway, HP and the like - donate hardware to Microsoft's coders so they can be certain that the next version of Windows will run cleanly on them.
To encourage these coders to actually use the donated machines, they donate the very fastest hardware they make.
I'm very strongly of the opinion that coders should use, as their regular desktop machine, the very slowest hardware that can possibly get the job done. To this day I write most of my code on an Early 2006 MacBook Pro. It has a Core Duo, not a Core 2 Duo, and so is not even 64-bit. It only has two gig of RAM and a tiny cache compared to the MacBook Pros that are available today.
This has the effect on me that I can easily tell when my own code is slow. I don't need to use a profiler to know that.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Are you not from earth or some shit?
He's from earth and knows what he's talking about. You obviously don't know what you're talking about. TDP is the OVERRIDING reason you don't see higher stock clocks out of intel products. 980Xs are expensive because Dell fucks up cooling? REALLY?!?! Go back to nursing your bong and quit posting crap about things you know nothing about.
My personal opinion is that overclocking does not buy you much, other than bragging rights. Sure you can get a few more FPS, or a few hundred extra MHz out of your CPU. But does that translate into anything usable? A false edge for gaming; false because there are so many other factors that can nullify that edge such as your connection parameters. Perhaps I'm too pragmatic, but then I don't watch Jersey Shore or Kardassians or fauxlebrity shows either.
I overclocked first computers (2000-2004). I bought a budget system in parts, put it together, got online, and learned that I could make my computer even faster with a little risk and careful effort.
But then the prices of components began to fall and I stopped overclocking new rigs 2004. Why? Because a normal $30 heatsink was barely enough to keep some of the hotter processors cool without overclocking... and I was not willing to risk losing my processor for a few more FPS in Counter-Strike or whatever I was playing that month.
Fast-forward to now, I still leave my main computer on 24/7, but as a career-person, I need to save more (house, retirement, vacations to placate the lady) and spend less on utilities. I also have less time to clean the dust out of computer cases that effectively had hoovers for cooling. So where I used to go for a balance of cost, heat, and overclockability, I now look at cost, heat, and power consumption. I now take pride in being able to comfortably play modern games (though not at max settings) on a rig supported by a 260 watt power supply. I have no guilt leaving that on overnight.
Note: I never got into water-cooling. I never had the space or disposable income to mess around with the kit or the risk.
Many industrial PCs are underclocked. They have more CPU power than they need, and they need more reliability and temperature range than the consumer manufacturers provide.
The end of overclocking is coming anyway, because speed of light lag across the chip, rather than transistor switch time, is becoming the bottleneck. No amount of cooling will help with speed of light lag.
Here here. Low power is the new stupid (half kidding) thing to obsess over. My most-used home computer with a UI is an Atom. In 2010 when people were drooling over how great Sandy Bridge might be, and how much kickass-per-$ the X6 Phenoms offered, I was looking for an Athlon II 240e for my server to downgrade to (eventually finding, to my joy, a 610e for sale, so that I could finally pay $130(?) for the downgrade), just so I could say I had a 45W-TPD-but-still-reasonably-powerful-for-transcoding CPU. Not that doing such things makes any sense at all, from a "green" or money-savings perspective; it's all about low wattage being the new dicksize ruler.
[Pompous English accent] "At your next dinner party, impress the all the wives by being the man with the smallest power supply."
And that's the relatively non-nerdy approach. Serious dudes are getting all excited over stuff like Raspberry Pi, etc
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I still overclock and nearly every PC I've ever owned has been overclocked to include an 8088 clocked up with a radio crystal back in the day (not a great idea). I was playing with water cooling and Peltiers before you could buy ANY hardware for that off the shelf too. Cut down heatsinks, PVC caps, fountain pumps, and overseas sourced Peltiers made for some really quick computers for their time! Games were fast, looked great, and I ran RC5 cracking programs to use up idle cycles for years.
Fast forward to the present. I still game but I am not quite into the really crazy high end stuff. I still use a PC for gaming almost exclusively. I no longer run programs in the background to eat up spare cycles and the cooling of my room thanks me for it. I AM running a water cooled CPU though using mostly off the shelf stuff that doesn't leak, my CPU is rock stable and not quite pushed to the edge. I upgraded my computer in the not so distant past for more speed and I'm pondering doing it again to the later SandyBridge architecture from my older i7 920 (4.1ghz). I'm also looking at the new 6core CPUs that have come out but they strip H.264 instructions apparently. :-(
Why? Well it certainly isn't gaming since right now games seems woefully poor at using multiple cores! Now I have another "hobby" and that is compressing video. I buy BluRay, rip them, and put them on my personal server for viewing on efficient Atom powered STBs (overclocked though lol). When I was doing this with a C2D running in the mid 3-4ghz range some movies like Watchmen took 8 hours or more to encode with my high settings. Now I can do a movie in 2 hours or less while still having CPU available to do other things. If I move to the more efficient CPUs produced now, and especially if x.264 supports their ENcoding instructions one day, my times will drop again as I should be able to hit close to 5ghz. At that point I'll either encode with higher settings or just enjoy that it's as fast as it's going to get. I boot from an SSD so that's quick enough. My video card is a fairly pedestrian GTX275 which might get a bump too, I'm not sure.
I have tinkered with using the GPU to encode as well. Right now my CPU alone can keep up with encoding on my GPU alone but mixing my GPU and CPU together (I found ONE package doing that and it wasn't x.264) was noticeably faster but severely limited my encoding options so I've stuck to CPU brute force. I'm hoping that with CUDA being open sourced more programs will begin using the GPU too.
I've processed A LOT of video and I do video for friends too sometimes. Being able to run tons of apps, lots of browser windows, and generally not care too much about what is and isn't running is a side benefit. I may try BF3 out but doubt it'll be so much better than UT2K4 that I'll be sold as it will likely be exponentially more difficult to play. I'd love to find more things to do with the CPU power I have and I do try to use power wisely. My server(s) are actually underclocked and sleep their drives when not being accessed, my video front-ends draw less than 15watts apiece, the PSU in this box is Silver rated and under 650watts. Rendering or compiling code would be fun but I am neither developer nor artist. Those of us who are could certainly find value in overclocking! I know a certain Apple guy who was pretty butt hurt his 8 core powerhouse costing quite a bit more than my computer couldn't encode video as quickly when he challenged me :-)
P.S. Yeah, I tinker with cars too, it's fun. I also laugh at those who talk about "shortened CPU lives" - get a clue. I have had exactly ONE CPU die and that was within the first 24 hours - warranty replaced. I've had overclocked CPU go for 5 years or more being passed down with no issue. This 920 has seen temps as high as 90C under full load for hours at a time when I had voltages too high and it's still ticking fine. My current peak is recorded as 75C. If you REALLY want to drop some heat water cool the video card, sadly these water blocks tend to be pretty custom and I don't do it since an upgrade on the video means a costly new block.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Checking the usernames on this subthread, it would appear there is a conspiracy of Ravens in here!
Yes, I've been keeping count too. This is a real statistical outlier, even for December.
(Mind you, I've seen fewer ravens on one thread -- but never more.)