Overclocking

[Guerre]

Soo, this might be a little random,

But do we happen to have any overclocking experts in the guild?

I recently (well, last night?) lol, put myself together a new system, having had ordered the parts over the last couple weeks.. and I think I'd like to OC it just a tiny bit. Not too much, since I don't water cool.

It's an i7-5930k, 32 gb corsair vengeance LPX ram, and dual EVGA GTX 980 SC ACX 2.0's in SLI.

The 5930k is a 3.5ghz per core processor. I'd like to try bumping it up to an even 4.0 for giggles. I don't think that's a lot to ask out of it? I know some have gone up to 4.5-4.6 easy.

I just know absolutely NOTHING about overclocking. I kinda know about setting the multiplier? but uh, when it comes to messing with voltages and stuff.. I don't really wanna screw that up at all.

Does anyone happen to know anything? Or perhaps a link to a guide or something I can look at later?

I only have windows installed on it at the moment, and got my drivers updated. No games, yet. Sad panda! I need to order a new hard drive, and try to rip my old gaming SSD out of my other machine to put in this one. It installed Windows in about 7 minutes though, and boots up in like 5 seconds. So I'm super happy about that! I'm using an m.2 samsung sm 951 as my current and only means of a "drive" at the moment.

I'll take a picture later if anyone cares, though I doubt they do. It's all shiny and new.

[Armelin]

It's been a while since I've overclocked anything (got a Pentium 4 Northwood from 3.06 to a stable 4 GHz back in 2003). How overclocking has changed since then, I'm not too sure.

Good places to go are the overclocking forum on Tom's Hardware (the stickies have some good info) and Overclocking.net.

Here are a few links to guides that may be helpful:

Haswell overclocking guide from Overclocking.net

Overclocking introduction from Lifehacker.com

Hope this helps out and good luck!

[Nirrudn]

This is, of course, entirely my personal opinion, but I don't think CPU overclocking is worth it for gaming. These days the CPU is very rarely a performance bottleneck, because everything is designed for the not-as-updated console market. The PC versions (usually) come with swankier graphics options, so that's often where you'll bottleneck.

Here's an example where overclocking the CPU up to almost 2x as fast provided zero increase in performance in Watch Dogs:

http://static1.gamespot.com/uploads/...3338-CPU_0.png

Similar case for Battlefield 4, although there is a whopping 4FPS difference:

http://static1.gamespot.com/uploads/...0077-CPU_0.png

Now, video card overclocking on the other hand, that's a different subject, and would almost always result in a performance gain.

[Guerre]

Okay then, thanks for the tips. Maybe I'll hold off for now and just see how it goes.

The next thing on my agenda is trying to figure out if I can just move my gaming SSD straight over to my new comp, or if half my games won't run that way if they are tied to the registry. I know a lot of blizzard games aren't, like WoW, when an old HD was having issues right before it crashed I just copied the entire thing over and it worked fine. But there's still my steam games, origin junk (like dragon age inquisition), or guild wars 2. I might have to reinstall all the latter, eh? no big deal. I ordered a new hard drive or two, so I can do it this weekend if I get them tomorrow or Sunday.

[Nirrudn]

Steam will now fix/add its registry entries automatically, I just did that when I got new hard drives a few months ago. I copied everything over and when I started Steam up, it popped up about being improperly installed and corrected things.