Overclocking

[Brittimus]

It seems like a lot of people are struggling with this. I know there are guides but I figured I'd post this here and whoever wants to add to it can feel free to.

You don't get much return on CPU overclocking but that's largely because you only get 15% of the benchmark score from the CPU at best. That's not to say it's worthless though because you can get a decent bump from that if you do it right. If you don't go over 1.5V you cannot kill your CPU from voltage, and from what I can tell you can't kill one from heat either. I just overclocked one to an absurd level with no cooler just to see what would happen. It hit 14,427C (comically hot) in BIOS and was fine when I brought it back to normal. Also thermal throttling doesn't kick in until around 95C. OCCT actually shows you if it's throttling or not so you can see how close you're getting. Make sure the CPU and the mobo you pick though actually can OC. Not all of them can. If you get a clock interrupt BSOD then you don't have enough voltage for your CPU so either turn the voltage up or the clock down. Base clock affects both CPU and RAM speed, Ratio only affects CPU.

RAM provides a really good return on OC for what it is, and all RAM can be OC'd and all mobos can OC RAM. You can always go one tick higher on RAM from stock speed if you up the voltage. For RAM it will not kill it as long as you don't exceed 1.65V. You will get a PRN_LIST_CORRUPT error if you clock the RAM beyond what it's capable of, just dial down the speed, or up the voltage if you can. Size doesn't matter only speed and number of sticks. Using more sticks than you have memory channels for the CPU doesn't improve speed. Neither does using larger RAM sticks (like 8GB vs 2GB they'll perform the same).

Overclocking the GPU has the largest effect because the graphics card counts for 85% of the benchmark. For now you cannot kill a graphics card by overclocking. It will just shutdown. A display driver timeout error indicates you don't have enough voltage on the GPU. A uDisplay.drv crash means you got the card too hot (around 95C again). Dual graphics cards will use the lower of the two scores.

An uncorrectable hardware error means you don't have enough wattage from the PSU.

I keep a spreadsheet with all of the standard benchmark scores for each CPU and graphics card. You can find others that people have posted if you don't want to make your own (I wouldn't blame you for using someone else's it takes a long time to get all that data). If you know ahead of time what the scores are you're aiming for it's easy to pick parts.

Finally if your CPU score and your Graphics scores are too far apart you'll bottleneck the system and you won't get the full value of the higher score. For instance if you throw dual 1080 Ti's in with your Celeron processor you will not get the full 85% of the Graphics score so it's best to keep them pretty close together on a build and keep that in mind on upgrade jobs. Also not all graphics cards or CPU's can overclock as far as others. Some models can usually get an additional 10%, some only get an extra 1-2% or less. And there is variability between two parts of the same model as well.

And that's pretty much all there is to the game.

Part Ranking is actually pretty worthless in my opinion, save your money and don't buy it until you have nothing else to do with your piles and piles of free money you make from finishing 3DMark jobs just by overclocking.