Overclocking Gpus

[caravel]

I have no doubt you are right Phatose, though in my experience the time and money invested on the cooling equipment is rarely worthwhile. Overclocking is really a hobby for those that like to push their hardware beyond specification. And I can understand why they do it. They rarely do it based on a cost perspective, it's all about defying the limitations and squeezing that little bit more out of something. Expensive cases, Thermal compunds, epoxys, heatsinks and water cooling systems are often involved, none of which are cheap. My point is that in the end you may as well buy a newer motherboard and CPU and it'll probably work out cheaper in the long run. OC'ing with nothing more than a thermalright SI97 (K7) and some arctic silver compound, as I have done, is not going to give you any massive gains, and that is affordable overclocking.

[Phatose]

I disagree. A fair quantity of OCers, myself included, do so primarily for budgeting reasons, especially when it's become so simple with the cool running A64s and Core2s. The chipmakers have been running that exponential pricing scale for quite a while too - a 2.2Ghz chip will cost you $50 more then a 2.0 ghz, while a 2.8 will cost you $400 more then a 2.6er. You start factoring in that many of the lowest end chips will hit clockspeeds equivalent to a chip 2, maybe 3 rankings higher then it, there's a cost efficiency there.

For technically minded folks on a budget, it's an inviting option.

Even if you're using non stock cooling there are monetary advantages. Good air coolers can often be used on a chip you upgrade too later - my XP90 took my 3200+ to 2.5 Ghz, a respectable 25% gain for a $40 cooler. But later I switched to a dual core Opteron 165 and it took it from 1.8 to 2.5 - well, that was more like a $400 difference between models. If you start looking at water cooling, the re-use advantage is there again - even if sockets change, you typically have to change only a small part of your cooling system out. Once you start getting into compression coolers, yeah, you're getting into the pure performance at any cost crowd, but there's plenty of room on the lower end for the budget minded.

There's always some gambling involved - you probably aren't gonna fry a cpu unless you do something massively stupid like throwing major voltage at it, but it is a risk you take - and usually the worst you end up with is exactly what you paid for. Sometimes you get more then you paid for, and recently the odds have been pretty good.

[BDC]

CPU overclocking is different from GPU stuff. The slower chips are just the same as faster ones anyway, so speeding things up a bit is unlikely to completely break it. Besides the slowest chips are pretty cheap to replace if you break...

GPU overclocking is just messy and pointless. 10% speed gains, with artifacts. Woo.