If you're overclocking that much, then you're having to do a lot of work cooling things off too. Unless you bought the absolute fastest processor that was just released to marked yesterday and want to overclock that, why not just buy a processor that's a step up from where you were going to spend in the first place?Frag Mortuus wrote:I disagree with both statements. I have a small overclock on my CPU and see about a 10FPS rise in games. Also, load times are shorter and boot time in general is faster. That is just going from 2.66 to 3.2Ghz. So an OC up to 4.0Ghz which is an ~50% OC would bring a significant performance increase. Now, you may reach a point where the OC is higher than needed in regards to the rest of your PC, meaning that the rest of your PC is acting as a bottleneck for your CPU. But, if your RAM and GPU, MoBo chipset, etc can all keep up with your OC'd CPU then you won't reach that limit and should notice some sort of performance increase.
So (numbers out of my butt) you could buy the 3 Ghz processor for $500, the water cooling block, radiator, hoses, and a case that will fit a radiator and spend another $500 for $1000 total. Or you could buy that badass new 3.5 Ghz processor that just came out for maybe $1000 for the same performance. Likewise with graphics cards. Buy mid to high range and spend more money cranking and cooling or just spend more in the first place for the ultra level card. Both will contribute to you getting 75+ FPS in some game that just came out with everything maxed but it isn't going to make that much visual difference than 65+ FPS would.
The 10 increase you say you're getting, what is that over? If it is 20 moving up to 30 FPS that's a big visual difference. If you're trying to stretch a little longer on an aging machine, then sure. But if you're buying new stuff, I say spend the money on the next level up hardware instead a bunch of super upgraded cooling, otherwise you're tweaking so you can show off your benchmark scores and your glowing neon water cooling tubes.
