Overclocking

Overclocking is the practice of making a component run at a higher clock speed than the manufacturer's specification. The idea is to increase performance for free or to exceed current performance limits, but this may come at the cost of stability.

Overclocking is mostly practiced by PC enthusiasts in order to squeeze the most performance out of their machines. Some enthusiasts will do this so they can buy a lower-end system, overclock it, and achieve the performance of a higher-end system. However, the cost of an adequate cooling system, and often even the cost of choice overclocking components results in a base of overclockers who mostly overclock as a hobby, or as a 'sport' of sorts - always striving for more speed.

Many enthusiasts will purchase high-end components to begin with, and then overclock them to achieve even more performance. The fastest home computers in the world are overclocked, and a stock (running at manufacturer's specifications) system is often no match for an overclocked one.

Contents

Considerations for Overclocking

The main aspect of overclocking is the need for more effective cooling than that of the inefficient air-based cooling systems which come packaged with typical CPUs and graphics cards. High-end, specially-designed, copper heatsinks are often used with powerful fans for better cooling. Liquid (usually water) cooling is another popular method, which uses liquid as a coolant because it is more efficient conductor of heat than air is. Instability is a major danger of overclocking, although most overclockers take some precautions to check their systems for stability. The process of stress-testing a system is often called burn-in, and it is common to run several applications simultaneously or special burn-in application that place a high load on the component being tested.

Commonly overclocked components include: CPUs, video cards, motherboard chipsets, and RAM. Methods that have been used to cool overclocked components include: forced convection (a fan blowing onto a surface); liquid cooling (liquid carries waste heat to a radiator, similar to how automobile engines are cooled); liquid nitrogen (perhaps the most dangerous method); dry ice; phase change cooling (as used in refrigerators); and submersion (placing the entire computer in an inert fluid). Liquid nitrogen is a temporary cooling measure in most cases, a sufficient or economical supply of power to maintain the LN2 coolant at liquid state. Because of this, liquid nitrogen (or dry ice, for that matter) is used as an extreme measure to set a record in a one-off experiment rather than to cool a system for a normal period of use. One reason is the cost of these extreme cooling methods, or usually because the hardware exposed to such cooling is ironically destroyed in the process. Of the aforementioned methods, air cooling, liquid cooling, and phase cooling are the most popular, due to their efficiency, availability, and affordability.

Overclocking arises in part due to the economics of the manufacturing processes of CPUs. In most cases, CPUs with different rated clock speeds are manufactured via exactly the same process. A batch of CPUs may be tested and binned--that batch is set to operate at a specific frequency because all of the processors function at that clockspeed. The clock speed that the CPU is marketed under is the speed at which the CPU has been tested to operate consistently well, but often there is a distribution where on one end there are the CPUs which are near their physical limit at the specified clockspeed and on the other end there are CPUs which can operate at frequencies substantially higher than their specifications. With proper power and cooling, slower CPUs can be made to run at the same speed, or faster, than similar CPUs with higher stock clockspeeds. There is a commonly held view that overclocking results in system instability, which is not the case when performed correctly.

In addition, there have been situations in which a chip manufacturer will deliberately underrate a chip in response to market pressure. This results in an inexpensive component, which (with a little bit of voltage) is easily overclocked to match the speed of a more expensive component. The best modern example of this would be the AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (codename Barton) processor, which is easily overclocked to match the speed of the AMD AthlonXP 3200+, a processor four times as expensive.

Advantages with Overclocking

  • You could, in theory, purchase a slower processor for a cheaper price and overclock it to the speed of a more expensive processor.
  • Faster performance in games and applications for "free".
  • Overclocking can be an engaging hobby in itself and supports several dedicated online communities like OverclockersClub.com (http://forums.overclockersclub.com), Overclock.net (http://www.overclock.net), OC Forums (http://www.ocforums.com/), HardForums (http://hardforum.com/) and XS.org (http://xtremesystems.org/forums)

Disadvantages with Overclocking

  • Increasing the clock speed and/or voltage of a component can shorten its lifespan or possibly damage its circuitry.
  • Increasing the clock speed of a component increases its power consumption or electrical "workload", which usually means a rise in temperature. If the temperature rises too high the component can fail. In some situations, the rise in power consumption may be a problem.
  • More common than hardware damage is the computer crashing, but able to reboot after being left to cool for a short time. Although the hardware is not permanently damaged, this is inconvenient and could cause loss of important data. In rare, extreme cases entire filesystem failure may occur, causing the loss of all data. The risk of losing data can be lessened against by using a journaling filesystem or redundant storage, but not completely removed.
  • Not every component of a computer is overclockable, for example hard drive platters cannot be made to spin any faster. Where hard drive read/write rate is the bottleneck, as it is for many processes, overclocking will bring little or no speed advantage.
  • Personal computers are mostly used for tasks which do not push the hardware, or where the speed of a task is restricted by 'bottlenecks' outside of the local machine. For example, web browsing does not require a very fast computer, and the limiting factor will almost certainly be the speed of the internet connection. Other general office tasks such as word processing and sending email are more dependant on the efficiency of the operator than speed of the hardware. In these situations any speed increases through overclocking are unlikely to be noticeable.
  • It is generally accepted that, even for computationally heavy tasks, speed increases of less than ten percent are difficult to discern. In video gaming, for example, most people would not notice a jump from 60 fps to 66 fps without the aid of an on-screen frame counter. Generally, gains of a few percent are sought for prestige rather than real-world computational benefit.
  • Products sold specifically for overclocking are sometimes little more than computer decoration. Although this is not a bad thing in itself, buyers should be aware of the FUD surrounding some products. Examples include heat spreaders and sinks designed for chips which do not generate a problematic amount of heat.

Overclockers

An overclocker is generally defined as someone who overclocks his or her computer. The term overclocker has grown to include a wider group of people. Overclocking is still a very prolific hobby. With cooling methods becoming more and more advanced and with inexpensive microprocessors being produced with the same core circuitry as faster microprocessors of the same series, a large number of do-it-yourself computer builders overclock to some extent.

External links

Some web sites that provide information on overclocking or serve as a community for overclockers include:

Overclocking Databases

These are online databases that hold detailed information of overclocked systems:

Overclocking Forums

Discuss overclocking, modding and benchmarking at the following forums:

Major Forums

Smaller Forums

See also



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