EggXpert.com
06 November 2007

Is Overclocking dying?

A few years a go this was popular with techies and people wanting to get a bit more out of their system. It was also popular with people seeing how far they could push components to the point of failure without actually wanting to use this power in gaming.

 As time went on manufacturers recognised people liked to have something "overclocked", so released their own factory overclocked graphics cards etc. Now motherboard manufacturers have all sorts of tools to make this more accesible to beginners.

We have now entered DX10, Quad Core and 8GB systems with dual graphics cards, and huge harddrives. I can see this pastime dying, as faster and faster systems get released, there will simply be no point.

 So how long before this is something ancestors did? 2 years? 3? 5?

Every pc I built I didn't bother with overclocking anything. In game I always had good fps as I spent a bit building it.

 

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Comments

# Blog Picks said:

Is Overclocking Dying? Nowadays faster and faster systems get released, will this cause overclocking

07 November 07 at 4:17 PM
# PROACEX1 said:

Well, technically, you are correct, eventually the amount of performance will start to become far larger then the gains you can achieve with overclocking, but it's going to be a few years, if not a decade before the stock performance starts outweighing the performance gain you'd get from overclocking...

A bottleneck from performance itself, how ironicially paradoxical...

Respectfully,

PROACEX1

08 November 07 at 6:15 AM
# clively said:

Is it dying? Kind of.

"Overclocking" itself won't go away.  

However, it won't be much longer before tuning applications become smart enough to completely tweak the underlying system based on the hardware physically installed.

Think combining products like memtest, nTune, and others into a test suite that could be run on boot up.  However has the time to pull this off would make a fortune in licensing to hardware vendors.

08 November 07 at 11:28 AM
# kevlarorc said:

I dont believe it will die out for at least several more years because as new, demanding games are unveiled we will want our systems to run them with ease no matter what hardware is available to us. I agree with proacex1 that eventually our hardware will be so good and cheap at the same time that we wont have to worry about what demanding game is coming out. Maybe this is something that will go in cycles, we have a period of demanding new software that hardware can barely keep up with then a period where it's hardware's turn to shine and the software developers have to think of new ideas to simulate realism. 15 year cycles sound good to you? My 2 cents.

11 November 07 at 3:35 PM
# Rayzak said:

I stopped doing it about 6 years ago - overcloking was fun back then. Nowadays I don't need it - I guess overclocking mostly fun for news-postnewbs :)

11 November 07 at 9:32 PM
# bubblebathgirl said:

Ha - well I did my first overclock ever just a week or two ago ... I posted a thread about it:

http://www.eggxpert.com/forums/thread/190516.aspx

I think for people that build their own machines there will always be a group of people that wants to push things a bit ... or a lot ... for me I simply saw my machine getting slower in comparison to a machine I was working on at an office ... so I figured it was time to try an overclock ... and guess what? It worked!!!

I've already planned on building a new system next summer ('08) ... so this should hold me out nicely until then.

12 November 07 at 9:32 AM
# Root said:

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19 November 07 at 10:37 PM
# PROACEX1 said:

Eventually, ray tracing and ray tracing hardware will become the new graphical standerd...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tracing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_rendering

Once it does, overclocking won't lead to any significant improvements...OCing will always be around, but it'll eventually only become something for benchmarks, not for in game performance...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_hardware

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Processing_Unit

RPU's will be so fast, overclocking will yield very little increase in performance...Of course, it'll still be around for the hardcore trying to get the best benchmark scores...But it'll become unneeded for the maintstream...

CPU advancements will eventually lead to Quantum Computers and even more advanced processing, making overclocking the CPU obsolete, except for the hardcore benchmarkers...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer

Of course, this will likely happen in years, if not decades, to come...Due to Moore's law, overclocking will always be around, but it'll become negligible, unneeded...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Eventually, Moore's Law will be modified by future advancements in technology, such as quantum computing...This is similar to Bell's Law...Of course, you have to remember Gate's Law and Wirth's Law...Software could become a limiting factor

And PC's themselves will soon start to become limited in power, due to the average electrical outlet limited to 120v, or 1800w (we've already reached 1400w PSU's)...PC's will have to become more power effecient, dramatically and exponentially so, or electrical sockets will have to become more powerful, eventually leading to a spiraling trend, limited by the Chaos Theory (Yet at the same time, the Chaos Theory also shows that OCing could provide siginificant gains)...And overclocking will die once that energy limit is reached...You simply cannot overclock if you don't have enough power 9And if you can get a hold of enough power, the world's power output is only so much, and will only grow so much)...All of these are relavant to overclocking becuase they can theoretically limit it in some way or another...

So overclocking will eventually "die" when energy usage of the system becomes to great (Essentially, it's Einstein's Theory of General Relativity at work, with Mass–energy equivalence applying in this situtation...), when the stock performance starts outweighing the performance gain you'd get from overclocking (As said previously), and finally the last possibility is when software becomes to complex, making performance gains from overclocking negligible and eventually obsolete...The three major limits to overclocking...

As said before:

"A bottleneck from performance itself, how ironicially paradoxical..."

To bad the KISS Principle can't be followed in technology...Or Ockham's razor, for that matter...

So, only time will tell (not if, but when) OCing becomes obsolete, and eventually dies in the mainstream market, and it'll become rare, even among the hardcore..."Definantly not anytime soon" is the safest assumption (Decades, maybe even centuries)...

There's my lengthly answer... :D

Respectfully,

PROACEX1

23 November 07 at 8:48 PM
# Blog Picks said:

Is Overclocking Dying? Nowadays faster and faster systems get released, will this cause overclocking

06 December 07 at 9:57 PM
# Dashkatt said:

Actually, I do hope over-cooking goes away... (my definition).  So many component reviews are skewed by wild statements made by someone sitting in a moldy basement that has devoted countless hours revving up a machine that could not possibly be run for more than 10 minutes without blowing out a transformer.  :P

Want more speed??  Buy it.

I do agree that OC'ing will subside due to the speed and quality of future components and limitations of software.

13 December 07 at 12:36 PM
# Blog Picks said:

Is Overclocking Dying? Nowadays faster and faster systems get released, will this cause overclocking

22 March 08 at 1:59 AM
# kc102 said:

I don't think it will die.

Everyone wants to show the world that their system is best.

Though, Intel kinda owned us when the OCed one of their processors to 500GHz by decreasing the temperature to 4K.

23 March 08 at 9:27 AM
# Penewab2007 said:

Seems to me there's plenty of people Ocing their boxes. As one reads through the reviews, it seems like 50-50 someone is telling us how fast they pushed their CPU. So I dont think it'll die. American's have an inate need for speed.

I myself though underclock all my chips, because I am environmentally concerned about the extra power Ocing uses up. Yeah , right!

24 March 08 at 6:19 AM
# Kardon said:

I would think it's the other way around and over clocking has dramatically increased. A few years ago people were impressed with a 200mhz oc. Now people will RMA a cpu if they can't get an additional 1ghz out of it. If you ask me 1ghz is far more worth the risk  of over clocking than 200mhz. although I agree with PROACE there is a theoretical cap on the need fro over clocking but I don't see us hitting it anytime soon

24 March 08 at 7:16 AM
# Jordan92rock said:

I don't think it will die out. I can't help but see how fast I can push my machine. But I do see what you mean with companies releasing overclocked components. I guess when we can't overclock anymore it will be modding your case or getting some other crazy mod done. Something has to take its place.

25 March 08 at 12:35 PM
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