OVERCLOCKING REMASTERED

An artisan’s guide to breaking the hertz barrier with Zak Storey.

An artisan’s guide to breaking the hertz barrier.

The two most important days in a system’s life are the day it is born and the day you push it to its full potential. Yeah, okay, that’s a slight reworking of a famous Mark Twain quote, but it’s inherently true. PCs are designed to be tested. It’s that constant striving for more performance, higher clock speeds and greater IPC from generation to generation that propels the computing industry forward under its own momentum.

Consumers want more. We want more. More performance, quicker load times, faster renders at higher qualities. That’s what it’s all about. And how do you get the most out of a processor? You overclock it. Yes, it does come with its caveats — power draw, in particular — but in our eyes, the positives far outweigh the negatives. And to those naysayers ready to pounce with statements like, “Are you really going to gain much from 100 points in Cinebench?” or “It’s just not worth the extra power,” well, we’re here to tell you that’s pure hogwash.

Why? Simply put, the benefits of CPU overclocking in the workplace environment are huge. Going from 4.0GHz to 4.8GHz on an Intel Core i7-6700K, for example, can shave off a sweet 20%when it comes to video render times, in contrast to running at stock. It doesn’t sound like much, but if you consider an average 10-minute 4K video would take an hour to render, that’s 12 minutes saved on a single run. Do that three times a week, four times a month, for a year, and all of a sudden you’ve saved more than a day working on your content. That’s a pretty big deal in our eyes. To say overclocking is pointless is the equivalent of saying that pursuing advances in processing speed is pointless.

Of course, with GPU overclocking, that is centred entirely around the leisurely pursuit of gaming, and increasing, those main frame rates — but that’s something we’ll touch on a little later. So what do you need to know? What do you need to crank up that frequency? And what can you do to make your system more stable in the process? Read on.