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| quote: | Originally posted by VERTiG0
Also Diginut you're kinda dumb for saying that overclocking is "not worth it."
It is VERY much worth it. Why wouldn't you get the extra speed if you can? |
Right, you really jumped the shark here. I thought you were smarter than this.
CPUs are not "made" to be overclocked. Nothing has changed between 5 years ago and today except for improvements in cooling and more precise control over the clock parameters.
Mostly, the lower-speed CPUs are the ones that failed factory tests at higher clock speeds. They get rebranded and sold at a lower price. Just because they passed your (no doubt highly exhaustive) "stress test" doesn't mean they're actually stable, and definitely doesn't mean that you aren't doing gradual damage to a chip which is designed to operate within a very narrow tolerance. It's possible that the particular unit you bought was never tested at the higher speeds, or failed some obscure test that will never affect you, but you have no way of ever knowing this.
And as I explained, to start with, the "extra speed" is almost totally imperceptible. Aside from a few very specific applications which I'm fairly certain don't relate to you, CPU is never the bottleneck anyway. It takes thousands of times longer for a single memory access, and thousands of times longer than that for a disk seek. It doesn't matter whether it takes 10 ns or 12 ns to execute a few thousand instructions when you shove a 10 ms (1 million times longer) wait time in there.
There are two CPU parameters which have been shown to have a noticeable effect on system performance. The first is number of cores, and today at least, once you already have 2, you've hit the point of diminishing returns (this may change in the future as more applications are designed to make use of the extra cores). The second is on-chip cache, which can actually make the biggest difference by eliminating some of those memory and disk access times, and a stock Q9450 with 12 MB L2 cache running at 2.66 GHz will easily outperform a Q9300 with a 6 MB cache that's been overclocked to 3 GHz. Always.
Clock speed means fuck all today. Even the manufacturers have realized that, which is why over the past year or two there's been hardly any change in CPU clock speeds, and instead they're concentrating on stuffing in more cores and bigger cache sizes.
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