Overclocking

Our worldwide overclocking championship has begun and we wanted to introduce you to the everyday components our teams will be tweaking to supersonic speeds in a bid for a shot at $5,000.

What happens when you put the top overclocking enthusiasts from 20 countries in the same room with the fastest hardware available? The LN2 flows freely and someone walks home with a $5,000 check.

Nominate contestants for the Tom’s Hardware overclocking contest to take place in Los Angeles on September 16th.

Overclocking is more popular than ever, but the fun is not just limited to boosting your CPU's speed - your GPU can be overclocked too. We tell you why and how to do it.

We've built and tested our low-, mid- and higher-cost systems at standard and overclocked speeds. Now we're ready to compare their performance, price, and value.

We already compared performance per watt over four generations of Intel CPUs. Now we compare AMD's Sempron, Athlon and Phenom CPUs to see if efficiency has increased over time on the AMD side.

Chaintech, Corsair, Crucial, Kingston and Supertalent battle at the DDR3-1600 and DDR3-1800 summits. Which premium memory product comes out on top?

We added a new interactive charts page that allows you to compare most of Intel's mobile Core 2 Duo processors. The results can also be contrasted to those of our desktop CPU charts.

AMD promised that Phenom could be operated in most socket AM2 motherboards. We tried running the new quad core on ten different products - and failed with most of them.

We've already seen how Intel's latest quad core CPU can easily push 4.0 GHz on air cooling, but how far will liquid cooling take it?

While graphics drivers and third-party utilities allow you to overclock your graphics card's GPU and memory, pixel shader clock speeds can only be increased through the card's BIOS.