Why Overclock

tlarkin said:
No, I think I know what I am talking about. I do this for a living. I used to sub contract for a company called Pro-Onsite who later got bought out by Conexio, look them up online. I used to do all sorts of after hours IT contract work for major advertising firms, recording studios, an independent news paper, a couple of small doctor's offices and a law firm or two. I don't do it any more because I make enough money now to not have to work two jobs.

When I went to go work on a render farm at a advertising firm they didn't over clock anything at all. Instead they had the environment work for them.

Again I am not saying it won't hurt but it lowers stability and it doesn't always improve real world application performance which is why it can be misleading. In some cases it may boost but in most cases if you have a high end system to begin with it won't make a difference. You can create tons of bottle necks and you will never get over the disk I/O bottle neck until everything runs solid state and disk storage is actually a ton faster than mechanical moving parts.
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Disk I/O is a bottleneck but when a program is using RAM mostly (like games and multimedia apps) then it is no longer much of a bottleneck. Yes, video encoding will only go as fast as your HDD will let you but typically video encoding involves getting the best quality with the smallest disk space used so say the 1080p video I encode will end up at 4GB in that hour it takes to encode, for my HDD to become the bottleneck, my CPU would have to complete the encode of a 1080p movie (roughly 1.5-2 hours) in under 2 minutes (about the time it takes to copy 4GB of data across the drive. In this scenario the HDD is not even close to being the bottleneck but rather the CPU is the bottleneck so the higher I can OC my CPU the faster the encoding gets and with my encoder being multithreaded, it really helps when 4 3.2Ghz cores are working rather than 4 2.4Ghz cores are working. Stability is a factor but I make sure my CPU can stay stable for longs periods of time (I use Softimage and did a 5 hours render once, it maxed out my Q6600 the entire length of the render and my comp ran it fine. So yes stability is a factor but it is easily managed if you know the limits of your CPU and you know how best to overclock your CPU.

On the other hand, the overclocking of my Q6600 did nothing to improve my Crysis FPS because in that case my CPU was not the bottleneck, my 8800GT was. As a result, when I overclocked my GPU, the FPS went up, if my CPU were the bottleneck then a GPU overclock would have done nothing. I don't overclock gfx cards because I believe you can't really overclock them high enough to make a big difference but CPUs can be overclocked to sometimes almost twice their clock speed.
 
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