View Single Post
Old 06-07-2006, 10:30 AM   #24
irrational_i
Regular User
 
Join Date: Jan 2004
Posts: 315
Default

Personally I wouldn't oc. The gains are not that high usually, even though they could be as high as say, 20%, but then you need some serious cooling usually.

Mostly a gain of about 5% and its unikely that you'll really notice that increase in operation.
your clockspeed wil show most clearly when you are encoding multimedia or maybe playing quake - where 500fps is silly as 120 is as much as you see.
Oc the gfx will have an impact, but you need a good card. Bad cards oc about 2% and overheat. If gfx is nvidia I'd consider oc for a basic 6XX/7XX card, but leave the GT/GTX as is.

Of course if you are just fiddling for the sake of it, go right ahead.

If you want watercooling for less noise, remember that the PSU is also a noisy component and watercool is not necessarily quiet. Good fans are very effective.
Go for somethiing with a large volume of airflow. Big blades/slow speed tend to be more quiet and effective.
I prefer Zalman as my Coolermasters always seema little louder than advertised.

A last note on cpu - I still run an AMD athlon 2600+ and thats plenty fast enough for coding and gaming alike. Although an upgrade to AMD64/pci-e is needed for games like Oblivion. Although dual-core is not yet the best solution. Give a year or so before apps start using the multi-processor capabilities.
For now an AMD FX-60 should be awesome for 90+% of your needs.
Gfx and RAM are the keys to increased performance.
So O/C is in my opinion not needed.
irrational_i is offline   Reply With Quote