is overclocking worth it?

[juxax]

Is overclocking a processor worth the hassle/chance you could burn it out? purely from a performance gain point of view. I know overclocking is a hobby for quite alot of you, therefore I am hoping your knowledge will be exstensive in how much performance you'll get from it, beacause I imagine the first thing that comes after a stable clock speed would be a benchmark.

I've read somewhere that it's possible to take a 3800 X2 to 2.65, My case is pretty crap, so I'd have to get an Arctic Cooler pro 64 (the universal socket one), and I could possibly take it to 2.7? but I have no idea how overclocking really works. I've read the FAQs both here and on OcUK forums, but I wanna know if a 3800, clocked at say 2.6 (which is the 5200s' speed at stock. I dunno if my core is a Toledo or Winchester, but I know it's the better overclocker of the two, as I asked when I first got it.

I recently upgraded my CPU from a athlon xp 2100+ to a 939, athlon 64 x2 3800+ @ 2.0Ghz, and I didn't reformat my pc, I just swapped in the prosc. I was thinking that might have an adverse effect on performance aswel, I am asking, primarily beacause Crysis is on the horizon, I'm about to reformat and change to a dual boot XP/Vista and check out DX10 Visuals for the first time.

 

[juxax]

for some reason theese forums suck rectal juice and won't let me edit, but..

I meant to ask if a x2 64 3800+ clocked at 2.6Ghz would match the performance of a 5200.

 

[Mugz]

Overclocking is worth it.

I'm running a P4 631 3GHz, currently clocked at 4.46(!)GHz using pin mod and BIOS overclocking. I've gone from 17000-odd points in 3DMark2001 to about 25000-odd. It makes a huge difference.

 

[Bobsama]

It's worth it--any performance gain you can get for cheap is basically always worth it. As for cooling, you should be able to overclock at least to the maximum speed in your processor's revision family.

Anyways--you should know everything that is in your computer, down to model part numbers and setups. If you don't know enough about your system, you can run into a serious problem. Right now I could start rattling off my current running computer's components, as well the components I have and want to use in my new build.

CPU-Z is one of the most-useful tools I've used... http://www.cpuid.com/

 

[juxax]

I don't know much about my system, but I know I don't wanna be using my pc then all of a sudden my prosc melts from heavy usage, at full load both cores run about 50, according to core temp, and from what I've heard if I had the arctic cooler it'd run about 15-18 less.

Whats the chances I could kill the chip, keeping the clock speed lower then the limit with an extra cooler? I know it's a pretty hard question to answer, but I just want opinions beacause I'm clueless.

 

[Guest]

OCing in moderation is always worth it. OCing with watercooling, not always, depends if you really want/need that extra performance.

 

[juxax]

I'm using a Athlon 64 X2 3800 @ 2.0Ghz (stock) 2GB DDR RAM, 250GB SATA II, BFG Geforce 8800 GTS 640, 19" Widescreen, 1440x900, 75Hz. And I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate, just recently installed, was using XP.

I get bottlenecked quite a bit, I mean bioshock runs smoothly, average at 30 FPS. with full settings and DX10 maxxed. When I used XP it ran better, but no DX10. Medal of Honor Airborne ran pretty bad on XP, then I forced on all settings on GPU at nvidia control panel, and it ran smoother, on Vista it runs slightly worse...

So, with Crysis on the horizon, and I get the feeling my cpu let me down by that little bit on XP, and marginally more with Vista. I feel a performance increase is needed for Extra Stability. My card can easily max theese games, but my Prosc struggles.

So I feel I need the performance increase that I'd get from overclocking, even if it was just to 2.5, when some people have got it safe to 2.6 with stock, I wanna get the arctic cooler 64 pro. (My case sucks)

 

[juxax]

Something I missed out:

Is there a program/website/anything that tells you the safe overclocking limit of a cpu at stock, with improved cooling, and finally with watercooling, etc etc? I don't wanna get into watercooling or anything like that...I just wanna see a limit of what my cpu can handle, and what sorta temps are to be expected at those clock speeds, and what is the max tolerance, etc.

Also does anyone know of a program that monitors the GPU temperature? I had one on XP, some nVidia thing, but I tried to install ntune and it said I needed a nForce mobo. I didn't have that before..