Written By : Wayne Brooker
August 2004

One of the things that never ceases to puzzle me when I visit the many enthusiast websites and forums around the 'Net is the lengths some people will go to in order to run their hardware beyond its design speed. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with the idea of overclocking in principle, I have an Intel 2.4c processor here that I regularly run at over 3.0GHz. The difference is that I have to do almost nothing to get it to this speed and the returns are well worth it.

When I find it hard to fathom is when somebody seems perfectly willing to go and spend tens and sometimes hundreds of pounds on exotic cooling methods that might, if they're lucky, earn them a few percent more than they're already getting. And to compound the problem, hardware is evolving so fast that the rest of us will probably be matching or beating their results straight out of the box in a month or two anyway.

So just what is it that drives that insatiable lust to be faster and better at any cost? If overclocking is performed to nudge that favourite game from a choppy 20 frames per second to a more playable 30 frames per second and it hasn't involved selling your car to get the money together to do it then I say go for it. In the majority of cases though this doesn't seem to be the motivation. In fact there seems to be only two primary reasons for overclocking your hardware, one is to generate class-leading benchmark scores and the other is pure bragging rights.

Okay, I admit that there's a small group of people who do it for pure fun. It's a little like hunting, select the right equipment and use the right techniques and you'll have a head to hang over your fireplace, and pointless though it may be it's still rather satisfying to know you've bagged your best kill to date. For others though it's more of a Testosterone thing. Having a higher frame rate in Far Cry or a better score in 3DMark is the virtual equivalent to an oversized gold medallion worn over a dark chest wig. Telling your mates you've just wrung an extra 30MHz out of your graphics card's GPU is the geek equivalent of putting socks down your trousers.

There's also the "something for nothing" approach where the desire to own more than you paid for is so strong it stops becoming financially sensible and instead becomes some kind of endless quest for the holy grail. I say endless because the goal posts are constantly moving. This week's hot overclock is next week's old news, and always will be. Dogs have similar problems when they go chasing their tails.

I some respects we need to blame hardware manufacturers for this strange mentality. For years we've been brainwashed into thinking that framerate was king and that nothing else matters. But let's not forget that this was an era where 30fps was more of a goal than a guarantee, and in this situation a few extra fps really was a valuable asset. I seriously doubt that the few extra fps beyond the 80+ you're probably already achieving is as important today.

I think it must be an age related thing too. I kind of get the same smug feeling from knowing my hardware is performing perfectly well while staying well within its design tolerances as others seem to get from pushing theirs to the brink of instability. I know my car can do 120MPH but I also know that if I drive at this speed everywhere I go the engine isn't going to last very long. I might do it once or twice in the time I own the car just so I know its limits, and for the fun of it, but not all day every day. And I'm the same with my overclocking, I enjoy the challenge of finding the limits but once I have I'm satisfied. I just don't care that some guy somewhere slaughtered my 3DMark score by breaking out the liquid Nitrogen because I'll probably get the same results as him after the next round of hardware releases but without the health risks.

Let me take my foot off the "old fart" pedal a little and say that I don't quite miss the point by as much as I've made it seem. I've been as guilt of "pointless" overclocking as most of you in the past, but that doesn't mean I really understand why. In moderation overclocking is fun, it's about strategy, skill and a lot of good luck. It appeals to those of us who think we're winners when the fruit machine pays out a $50 jackpot but try not to think about the fact that it cost us $100 to do it, and let's be honest, that's most of us.

As manufacturing techniques and yields improve for a given processor, memory chip or GPU/VPU, so we see performance improve too, and overclocking hardware based on a mature technology can often bring very worthwhile gains while doing no harm at all. When this is the case though you tend to know because the gains come quite easily. It's when people are prepared to buy vast amounts of specialist gear to squeeze out an extra few percent that I find it hard to see the reasoning. Oh sure it's a challenge, but so is swimming the channel with lead ankle weights on, and I don't see too many people queuing up to do that!

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