2.65GHz vs 3.3GHz vs higher? | Effective Differences on Performance?

[orionanomaly]

I'm considering overclocking. I have an under-clocked Core i7 975 Processor from 2009, running on 2.65GHz.

I'm wondering what kind of real-performance improvement (outside of benchmarks and other synthetics), I'll see if I clock to the CPU stock of 3.33GHz or even higher?

I run a lot of programs at once (6-8 browser windows with 50 tabs each, office programs, video editing, Skype, etc.), and despite having 24GB of RAM, I've noticed some performance issues (sticky responsiveness, occasional locking up, etc.).

I'm wondering if boosting the CPU performance will improve any of this though, as from what I know, these types of applications, absent video editing, are NOT CPU-dependent.

Can anyone give me a subjective or experiential opinion of what kind of performance benefit I would see from an overclocked processor?

Thanks!

 

[spawnkiller]

It'll respond faster (feel snapier) and you will see some FPS gains in game and also have reduce rendering time, compression/decrompession time (ex: winrar)

Definately if you run that much programs, you want the fastest possible CPU clock...
(It'll feel snapier like i said as even if that's not video rendering, they all take a part of it's usage so 50 programs at 20% usage = way over the capacity of that CPU but when overclocking, you'll have more room so the 20% will become 15-10% as the total output capacity just went up by overclocking you processor...

 

[Cons29]

aim for 3.4ghz maybe. wow, you really need hundreds of tabs??

 

[13thmonkey]

I suspect that windows itself is struggling under those loads. imagine the number of flash & java threads from each tab. I doubt it would make much difference, nor would going to a newer and faster platform, as yours is not an old platform.

 

[orionanomaly]

Sort of a mixed opinion set there, obviously trying it would be the remedy...

But more generally - this is a debate I've been having (with myself + others) for years now - is performance software or hardware limited?

/*
1. Just a note on browsers - I use 100s of tabs because I have a lot of ideas/projects/etc. that come to me in the midst of working on other things, and I use tabs as a 'place-holder' of sorts to keep things in front of me/remind me of them so I can deal with them at a later time.

2. Yes I use various tab add-ons to stick them on the side, but I still wind up with a lot of open ones, especially when doing research and the like. While Fx15 is better in that it doesn't load the tabs unless you click them, it doesn't seem to reduce the memory footprint very much.

3. There really isn't a 'hardcore' industrial-type broswer out there (yet) in my opinion, since if I have sufficient memory, as far as I'm concerned, I should be able to scale and run as many tabs as I can store in local; but this isn't the case - the browsers are very limited in the amount they can run before they crash. I find this an extremely annoying software limitation, only partially alleviated by running different browsers simul.

4. I wish browsers would jump a generation ahead with techs like 'network-node-history-mapping (so a GUI which maps your web travels interactively, negating the need to keep tabs open), and a more local-based solution to the web, so a webpage isn't constantly at the mercy of a browser, but can be leveraged like a phone app as a distinct entity/instance of a certain web service.

5. Web archiving is also something that I think is terrible - if I read an article that's 3 years old, and then go to look for it next year, what are the chances that it will still be sitting on the server? The lack of an easy way to save digital documents (in their completely native and un-adulterated form) is something I find annoying.
*/

6. As for all the other software - I really believe that it hasn't caught up, or more accurately, isn't designed properly, for our current hardware.

I have spent tens of thousands on custom workstations, only to find that I'm still fairly limited in terms of the programs I can run in simul, and indeed, system stability. I tend to be (unjustifiably) outraged when my $10k workstation crashes for whatever reason - always software or drivers.

7. As for the person who mentioned Windows - I actually know very little about how the OS manages hardware resources like memory, which I know is the subject of intense study in Computer Science and OS design, not to mention general programming. If indeed, Windows is also bottlenecking the access to all that shiny hardware underneath, obviously, there isn't much I can do about that either - also frustrating.

8. I'm considering that it could possibly be quite useless to continue to spend so much money and energy on hardware, since it doesn't seem to be helping on the performance front, which seems to be a software problem... probably not something much to be discussed on a hardware forum