Is Overclocking now useless?

you know, there's this concept that

overclocking

is dead that I want to talk about, um, it's partially true, but we're going to talk about modern CPU components, even GPU components, and whether or not you like the ability to Overclocking is something you should even worry about. For those looking for a high-end custom gaming experience, look no further than Falcon Northwest. Falcon Northwest has been building PCs made for gamers for over 30 years with a focus on a true gaming experience. high-end gaming. Custom cases available only through Falcon. Northwest features state-of-the-art testing and design to ensure every component performs at its peak through thermal imaging and rigorous laboratory testing designed and overseen by Falcon Northwest's own founder with a full line of systems ranging from small to large for each The Falcon Northwest system includes a three-year warranty policy and one year of round-trip overnight shipping coverage, providing ultimate peace of mind to see everything Falcon Northwest has to offer.

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overclocking

means to boost an Asic Beyond its similar rated speeds, so an asset could be anything, it could be a CPU, it could be a GPU, it could be a Raspberry Pi could literally be anything that has a core clock, so our CPUs, as you know, have all types. of different clock speeds these days and there's like a single core, there's two cores, there's like three cores, six cores, eight cores and what I mean by this is that the number of cores under load determines the speed, so is that every CPU you look at now says up to 5.5 GHz or up to 5.8 GHz because there is a very strict set of criteria that must be met in order to get that clock speed.

Is there a thermal margin? Are you close to your TJ Maxx in temperature? What is your? power limit what is your power consumption is like the power consumption would be things like how many amps are you actually drawing through the CPU how much voltage is being sent to the GPU how hot is the GPU, so all of these things influence when it's about your clock speeds now, the thing is that modern components are being taken as far as they are being taken today, like 5 GHz was a pipe dream 5 years ago, like 5 years ago it sure is possible that you've had a 9900 K here and there, that could go up to like 5 GHz, maybe it's all core, maybe and then the really good chips might run like 5, a load of one or two cores.

Now we are talking about 58 or 14900 K which works like 5,800 MHz single core and dual core. load and then up to 5.5 gahz, all cores, that is completely unheard of, but one of the ways they have achieved this is the fact that they have to push the power limits to incredible limits, for example the 14900 K that I have installed it on my test bench right here on an Asus board uh. I don't remember which one it is exactly. I don't really remember which one it is. It says up to 5.5 GHz, but runs at 253 watts. Now what I have.

I'm going to show you here real quick, real quick and we'll do some demos here on how to get the full advertised performance out of your CPU because essentially it's almost like an overclock now to get the advertised speeds, which is really stupid. and it should border on marketing legality at this point. um you can see here, we have a couple of cores that are in the 5.8 GHz range, there's one there, there's one there, which will be delivered to down there, look, look, that was 55 back. and so cores 2 and three in the P core layout tend to be the preferred cores for the higher clock speeds, all e cores, as you can see in 4.3, now realistically what should What's happening here is that when you start Cinebench we should see it go to 5.5.

GHz all cores, the problem is what we're going to find is that getting 5.5 GHz all cores at 100% sustained load is not what you're going to get, you're going to get like 52 51, so look at this. We don't care about our score and stuff right now in sbench. I'm just using this as a benchmark to load the CPU, so now we'll look at the scores to compare, but I don't when I press start. in all tests or multicore you will see 55 in all cores, now 5'2 dropped like we had three or four seconds of 5.5 GHz and what sucks is that that is all that was basically required for Intel up to 5, 5 GHz. to really legal, so our power shoots up to 253 XX watts and that's exactly what its maximum power rating is now, which is why we can't get 55 on all cores sustained because there has to be a limiting factor. a throttling reason, yes, right now if I were to mention XTU or Intel's extreme tuning utility, I would have a throttling reason of yes, since power would be our limiting factor here, so what many manufacturers of motherboards are doing is lifting those power limits right out of the box.

I already made a whole video explaining that motherboard manufacturers should leave Intel's limits in place unless the user goes in and specifies lifting those limits because the cooler has a lot to do with how well. can work because the problem is when you increase the power, what do you do? You also raise temperatures. What overclocking has essentially become these days is not necessarily pushing the core beyond its rated spec or specified speeds, which are up to 5.8 single core and above. at 5.5GHz with all cores at a 49 or 4900K, you're just trying to manipulate the specs to maintain the advertised speeds, so let's do this.

I'm going to go ahead and load up XTU. I love XTU because it allows me to make these changes. on the fly in the OS, so now what I want to see is if I can get close to exceeding 5.5 GHz on all cores and I'm not entirely sure because components get very close to the limit these days, you know . well above the 5 GHz range, even AMD and that's an AMD computer behind me with a I don't remember what CPU is there, but it's an AMD system right there, even with amds Precision boost overdrive and stuff, it's very difficult to get. advertised speeds for a long time and even those CPUs are in the 5GHz plus range now which is huge for AMD, they were missing clock speeds for so long and they have definitely caught up with that 5gz race so which here is our multi our performance core ratio multiplier is 55, so multiplied by 100 we get the 5500 and then the efficiency core at 4.3.

Now what I'm going to do now is I actually have to go into, you know, what I'm going to click on automatically. overclock and see what happens. I haven't done this for a while, let's see if it actually does anything useful, so I boosted it to 100 MHz on each and raised the offset by 20 moles. Well, the attempt was at 9 CC immediately there are 55 in total. core now we go down 54 hey it's actually doing something look at our TDP right there 330 WTS 903c on the core and we're getting the 5.5 GHz on all cores. You'll notice that we have 5.6 selected and we don't get 56, we're actually at 54. right now and that's due to the fact that we probably increased our power limit to that 330 mark, which means that with our extremely high voltage on right now at 1.33 we're not even getting the number we put in, we're still not even getting sustained ad numbers and we added clock speed and voltage so the optimized power and current limits gave us a limit of 330 which is what which I thought based on what I saw right there, 425 amps and then I know that now I can actually adjust this type of thing, but I'm going to use 5 six.

I'm going to try 57 more with original voltages, let the 330 be what I'm not going to update the voltage, yes, so it will immediately go down to 5.5. GHz, we are at 323 Watts 91c now, this is where Asic quality really starts to play a role; if we have a really good CPU that allows us to undervolt and overclock we will get really good performance here and I think 330 watts is a safe limit due to the fact that we know the 360 ​​cooler can handle anything more than that would require exotic cooling, probably somewhat cold or beyond room temperature, there is a 38835, but it is still very underperforming than I would expect to have gotten 13900 K to be almost 40,000 and above 40,000, this by now would start to require a lot tuning and a lot of work for 300 MHz.

Now, what's more important than quote-unquote overclocking these days is simply getting our advertised speeds over sustained periods of time, so here's what we're going to do again: We're going to lower this again to 5.5, we're going to leave the efficiency core at uh 43, which is stock and what I'm going to do What I have to do is I want to leave the enhanced limits because we know we need more power limit to do it, but I'm going to start Let's play with a displacement here. I'm going to go to minus 50 changes and let's go. see if this will allow us to get everything I'm trying to do now, screw overclocking.

I'm just trying to get that allore number to stay all the time now, the thing is while I'm gaming and stuff right now with a lower load it would probably be staying at 5.5 is fine but overclocks aren't considered stable unless that can handle extreme workloads like this without crashing, like there's a stable game, there's a stable general usage and then there's the stress test table and the stress test table is the only one I really really care about, it's well there's 55 all 84c cores still at 55 84 83 so it looks like we have a pretty good comparison there where the temperature won't make us go down 55 all the time there's a 38329 so you see all I did It was I didn't overclock anything, I just lowered the amount of voltage I needed. um yeah we're only consuming 288 watts right now which is good at 5.5 GHz but as you can see the original speeds couldn't sustain that but the original 253 watts because the two and the 253 watt limit would never allow that the full load would sustain those types of clocks, but now I want to see if we can overclock 56 cores to -50 now that we are technically overclocking because we are above the recommended 5.5 not recommended but indicated Maximum two speeds we stay at 56 everything time there is a 38729 so it's not a huge gain but voltage and frequency are linked so as the frequency increases the voltage increases with it so now I'm going to try minus 60 so now we go down to 307 309 or 89c, so this is also a peak, this is the maximum temperature, which means it reached 91 for a second.

We're at 8889 now, so we're down 3 c 2 c 3 C, but there will also be. become a point where you will see the clock spot but if you lower the voltage too much you will notice the score drops even though the frequency stays the same and the reason for this is because of the lower power available and that linear frequency scale of voltage and power, there may be frequency changes too fast to see in the software, but the frequency may be making quick micro adjustments that are enough to really affect the score, so once you start to see the score go down if you can , if you say I can keep going up voltage, this is great, you might notice that the performance drops with this and the stability is still there.

I'm going to go down to -80 and see if we can sustain it. If so, then. I could increase the efficiency cores to 46 now that we're technically in overclocking territory. Oh look, we actually lowered the score. There's a 39634, so I'm going to run this again just to see if we continue like we lost 200 points going down. our voltage, I want to make sure that we're not getting a micro acceleration with the frequency here, which could have been a strange back-to-back race on that, yeah, we lost more points, 39577, so I'm going to go. 75 and see if those 5 mutes help you, you'd be surprised what 5 mutes can really do, it's a 39779 okay so let's try 46 oh there's a hard system crash so this video right now doesn't It was to show you how to overclock. you know how much work really goes into getting a very mediocre overclock as we know it.

And I used to know that it's very, very different than 10 years ago. My best overclocking CPU I've ever had was a 1.86 GHz e6300 core2 Duo processor that ran at 3.34 GHz for its entire life, almost double the nominal speed, it was two cores and there was no hyperthreading, which was actually hyperthreading . I don't remember, I don't remember if it had hyperthreading or not, but all I know is that the frequency it ran at was Crazy, I ran that CPU for years and then gave it to my brother in law where he ran it until he shut down the motherboard without any relation to the CPU.

That CPU never complained about temperatures or frequency, which was one of the most underrated CPUs of all time. but in the past you know we could increase our frequency we would see CPU frequencies go over 1000MHz above the published speeds, but because the hardware is being pushed to its limits now due to the CPU race that has taken place since Ryzen. came out with AMD giving a real danger to Intel's market share when it comes to desktop computers. We saw this race for clock speed speed, so essentially manufacturers like Intel and AMD have found ways to push their CPUs as close to the limit as possible. possibly they can do it right away.

If those ongoing updates push the limits as far as they can, leaving us very little room to be able to overclock, now gpus, let's talk about gpus for a second here. Don't know. I even really need to demonstrate this, every GPU that you put in your computer on your motherboard and turn on like an MSI afterburner and monitor your speeds, every single one of them will go beyond where advertised, they will automatically overclock and that's by design because they called GPU boost for NVIDIA and AMD has others, like auto overclocking and rage mode and stuff like that, that aren't as aggressive because AMD is still discovering the limits of Silicon and stuff when it comes to their GPUs, so you don't really get allow them to be pushed too far, it takes a lot of modifications to really boost an AMD GPU, but Nvidia on the other hand when it comes to GPU boost we are in GPU boost 3. more territory now where in the past it used to boost the frequency if temperature was available, then the GP boost would allow you to increase the frequency with temperature and power limit.

Headroom where you could go beyond the specified power limits, see back in the In the early days of GPU boost uh 1.0, you could actually modify the voltage slider, you could move the voltage slider and have it affect the real voltage to the GPU, giving it real overclocking capability when it comes to the end user once GPU Boost 2.0 enabled it. power limit adjustment, voltage control became no longer accessible to the end user, where all they could do is control the voltage slider. What I mean by that is like I referenced with the c that has, there's a frequency and a voltage, uh, correlation like correlation between the two, if you raise the frequency, the voltage moves with it, all you can do with Nvidia now when it comes to the voltage slider is to move the slider, what I mean is that you can increase the voltage at a faster rate, but you can't.

Don't exceed the voltage, that's by design, that voltage is locked, you can't exceed it unless you go and do voltage modifications and lock custom voltage controller modifications and soldering and all that kind of stuff. Now we are talking about exoc or extreme overclocking. Overclocking on the GPU is not even fun due to the fact that we are already in the 2700 2800 mher range and you can overclock to 300 MHz, we are talking about just over 10%, which would be very difficult to notice at plays a 10 extra % frames on a high end gpu and most people spend their time overclocking high end gpus because there is nowhere above that to go for levels so you have to overclock it as you we know in the past.

It's a bit dead, I mean, now all we're trying to do is just tame the monsters that ask for huge amounts of power and TDP to cool, which is now making things like water cooling relevant again, That's why I think this year. I'm bringing water cooling month to the summer where we just do all kinds of water cooling projects, videos and stuff and play around with it due to the fact that high end CPUs and high end GPUs are definitely demanding , I mean we are talking about 600 WT gpus, we are talking about 300+ WT CPUs from Intel with similar multi core upgrade and msis whatever they call it hoax, like all motherboards are pushing CPUs beyond their 253 watts for 1490 or 14900 K and I think it's like 270 watts or 230 watts or 220 watts because I don't remember anyway, each CPU has its own maximum power, each motherboard is pushing those further because they are trying to push the frequencies as far as they can. out of the box, so it's good that the overclocking is being done for you, but if you like the fun of tinkering and overclocking like I do, they kind of took all that away from you, that's a little depressing, how do you feel you guys about it every time I do it?

I've made overclocking videos in the past. I see a lot of comments saying that overclocking is stupid. Why would you overclock? Why not? Why did someone at one point decide to take two cars and see if you can go faster that way?