Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in
Your question

If no game is maxing my CPU 100%, is it worth overclocking still?

Tags:
  • Overclocking
  • Games
  • CPUs
  • Monitors
Last response: in CPUs
Share
March 26, 2013 11:12:54 PM

I have a 1090T, and was wondering this. I've seen the charts where better CPUs will increase FPS in a game like BF3, but if my CPU monitor never shows 100%, would overclocking make a difference? I don't have that great of screen, 1680x1050, and from what I understand lower resolutions tax the CPU more typically.

I have a modest OC of 3.6ghz right now. If the answer is Yes, why?

More about : game maxing cpu 100 worth overclocking

a b K Overclocking
a b à CPUs
March 27, 2013 2:43:27 AM

Good question; I would like to get some clarity on that myself.

It seems to me that FPS may actually be impacted before the CPU hits 100%. If the game requests the CPU to do something, framerate will be affected by how fast the CPU can execute the said task. This may not necessarily requre 100% of available CPU time. The reason Intel chips are quite often faster in gaming benchmarks appears to be a more efficient architecture, so they get more done in less time, sometimes even at lower clock speeds. AMD can make up the difference to an extent by overclocking, but only to a point.

EDIT: Forgot to add: There are cases where the CPU just isn't taxed enough for overclocking to make any difference. If you see the CPU charts showing similar performance regardless of CPU used, that's a pretty good indication the game is not CPU-bound.
a b K Overclocking
March 27, 2013 4:41:25 AM

There are cases where overclocking will still be the best option.
This mostly applies with multi-core CPUs on single-threaded games.

If a game can only use one thread, it's doubtful it'll max the cpu simply because it can only tax one core. While other factors can come into play, overclocking the cpu so that each core runs faster can generate improvement here.

Like Koos said, FPS will likely be affected by the GPU before the CPU (depending on settings and configuration) but it just depends how graphically intensive the game is versus how much goes on in the back-end.

In your situation, assuming you have a decent modern GPU, you may see some gains by overclocking the CPU if you aren't at 60fps, but remember that anything over 60fps is worthless unless you have a 120hz monitor actually running the game at 120hz.
Related resources
a b K Overclocking
a b à CPUs
March 27, 2013 4:54:00 AM

doct3rphil said:
I have a 1090T, and was wondering this. I've seen the charts where better CPUs will increase FPS in a game like BF3, but if my CPU monitor never shows 100%, would overclocking make a difference? I don't have that great of screen, 1680x1050, and from what I understand lower resolutions tax the CPU more typically.

I have a modest OC of 3.6ghz right now. If the answer is Yes, why?


few games will use all your cores, in fact two efficient cores can carry a large work load in gaming. If you want to see the difference in gaming, use FRAPS to see your FPS in OC and non-OC benchmarks. On my phenom II x4, i saw little gain in gaming after hitting 3.8ghz

March 28, 2013 10:17:31 AM

Thanks everyone. That makes sense that most games don't use all 6 cores so it would never show 100% usage. It's harder to watch task manager without a 2nd screen to see core usage. I will test with FRAPS and try to bump up the clock rate a bit higher.
a b à CPUs
March 28, 2013 12:04:28 PM

Yes.

Look at it this way: If no core is reaching 100% over some timespan (lets say 1 second), that means the CPU is waiting around doing nothing some percentage of the time. That can be due to multiple reasons however, including thread contention, needing to wait for data, and so forth.

In addition, it is important to note that at any particular instant, its possible multiple threads will all need to run. If more threads are runnable then cores, then some threads have to wait. So while they will "eventually" run, they will have to wait for some period of time, decreasing applicaiion performance.

So overclocking will ALWAYS help to some extent. Whether it is measurable is another story.
a b à CPUs
March 28, 2013 12:06:55 PM

Easier example: You have a single core processor. You have two threads. One takes .5 seconds to run, the other .25 seconds to run. Therefore, over 1 second, there is apparently no bottleneck (CPU @75%).

However, if both threads are ready to run at the same time, one will have to wait. As a result, the application's performance is degraded, as it haws to wait for the other to finish.

So in this case, overclocking will reduce the period the threads are waiting for eachother to finish. So OC'ing will improve performance.
!