Overlocking your comp?

[deadman]

can overclocking your computer damage other components on the motherboard such as the onboard network adaptor? for the past few months, my network keeps disconnecting or even completely disappearing from windows! after a complete shutdown & a few minutes disconnected from the main, it eventually shows again? any thoughts from any nerds out there?

[LaaMok]

I have some expert expert advice for you, buy a faster fucking computer!

[deadman]

I have some expert expert advice for you, buy a faster fucking computer!

the overclocking was still within capabilities of the motherboard & processor!!!

[LaaMok]

the overclocking was still within capabilities of the motherboard & processor!!!

 

ah right, it sounds like your motherboard is dehydrating from all the extra work. Add 250 ml of water. Make sure its on.

[Grumpy]

When you overclock, sometimes the fast clock makes the PCI bus act crazy and causes the peripheral to desync, see if you can set it separately. I doubt it is actually damaged from the overclock.

[dudebrah]

did you try changing the batteries in the clock , maybe they are getting low ?

[hazze]

Usually you can get away with a bit of overclocking. The manufacturers tend to be a bit catious with the speeds they set. But then now and again you'll run into one you can't.

 

Overclocking can cause your computer to have problems and in extreme cases can damage your computer.

 

Easy answer i guess would be to reverse the overclocking and see how your computer performs.

 

Have you tried a new network card? They are about £10 in the uk.

If your PC has an onboard network card, buy a seperate one and use that. Onboard network cards are very flaky.

[el_jefe]

It's also not like overclocking 10% is going to make your experience 10% faster. it's generally not worth it.

[noodles]

try formatting your hard drive

[Grumpy]

It's also not like overclocking 10% is going to make your experience 10% faster. it's generally not worth it.

 

As a super nerd I disagree.

[el_jefe]

As a super nerd I disagree.

 

yes speed on the core itself will be faster but anything off CPU (e.g., ram, IO, network) will not be improved. how much time does an average user spend off CPU? I would say a windows user spends most of their time there. l1, l2 caches aside - I doubt windows is reasonable enough to keep any working set in there for long. i.e., amdahl's law. But I never give the MS guys much respect Also I am assuming a traditional hard drive rather than a solid state disk - ie flash.

 

Also note most server class machines are getting more cores and not increasing clock rates as the cost /benefit does not warrant faster clock speeds (and its getting harder to make them faster and at some point thermodynamics comes into play); but of course server class machines itself covers a broad range of types from front ends to honking Oracle boxes.

 

Note I said noticeable difference in user experience which I realize is very general since there's a big difference between browsing the web and running the latest version of quake.

 

Or am I mistaken? I know very little about clock speed affects on multi-core cpus

 

But, a super nerd may have different usage patterns than a normal person or even one of us:)

Edited April 1, 2009 by el_jefe

[deadman]

When you overclock, sometimes the fast clock makes the PCI bus act crazy and causes the peripheral to desync, see if you can set it separately. I doubt it is actually damaged from the overclock.

you may have a point grumpy! the onboard network adaptor is using pcie which i didnt overclock, just the cpu & ram! i only oc'd the cpu intel q6600 from 2.4ghz to 3.394ghz but couldn't stabilize it due to a shitty vid so dropped down to 3.28!

[Grumpy]

yes speed on the core itself will be faster but anything off CPU (e.g., ram, IO, network) will not be improved. how much time does an average user spend off CPU? I would say a windows user spends most of their time there. l1, l2 caches aside - I doubt windows is reasonable enough to keep any working set in there for long. i.e., amdahl's law. But I never give the MS guys much respect Also I am assuming a traditional hard drive rather than a solid state disk - ie flash.

 

Also note most server class machines are getting more cores and not increasing clock rates as the cost /benefit does not warrant faster clock speeds (and its getting harder to make them faster and at some point thermodynamics comes into play); but of course server class machines itself covers a broad range of types from front ends to honking Oracle boxes.

 

Note I said noticeable difference in user experience which I realize is very general since there's a big difference between browsing the web and running the latest version of quake.

 

Or am I mistaken? I know very little about clock speed affects on multi-core cpus

 

But, a super nerd may have different usage patterns than a normal person or even one of us:)

 

So will overclocking improve web surfing speeds? Hell no. I agree with you there. This is determined by your connection, as virtually anything from 1.0Ghz up can surf the web...

 

BUT as a video rendering (sfx, encoding) hobbyist (need the multi-core) and an occasional gamer (need the max clock/ram speed) my user experience is very much related to my absolute system speed. Multi-core systems don't have much of an edge over single-cores in gaming.

 

Overclocking classically involves the FSB speed which effects both the RAM and the CPU but (generally) not the disk access speeds (in some cases an overclocked PCI bus can improve RAID performance)....but once you toss in RAID 5 (or 0), the machine kicks the shit out of virtually any consumer machine available. Some of your points were valid a few years ago, but are becoming less relevant, such as the latest Core i7 cpu having the memory controller onboard.

 

you may have a point grumpy! the onboard network adaptor is using pcie which i didnt overclock, just the cpu & ram! i only oc'd the cpu intel q6600 from 2.4ghz to 3.394ghz but couldn't stabilize it due to a shitty vid so dropped down to 3.28!

 

Give it a shot mate. See what happens, it can't hurt.

[el_jefe]

Yes, as more things are stuffed into the CPUs various buses get faster when overclocking too. But, if the CPU is the bottleneck only 50% of the time, overclocking by 10% will show performance of 5%.

 

I know you gamer uber geeks want to get every usec out of your HW. But, I would think the video card would have a bigger impact than the CPU. i.e., cpu only matters if you already have a very good video card.

 

RE: RAID 5 - hate it. If you are doing any significant amount of writes it will perform very badly as every write requires N-2 reads and 2 writes. I'm much more of a raid 1+0 guy as disk is pretty cheap and big these days.

[sicknote]

I overclock every system I buy. When I'm building a new comp overclockable componets are the first thing I look for.

 

A speed boost of 25% is usually easy to achive with air cooling.

 

Look at the new i7 920 2.66Ghz. Can easily be overclocked to 3.8Ghz.

 

The next processor up is the 940 2.93Ghz which is double the price of the 920......why would anyone buy this.

[Jameson]

Delete your system32 folder under C:\windows

 

 

This will reset your drivers, maybe help you out a little?

[prak]

It is unlikely that any reasonable overclocking would physically damage any components. However, overclocking could be causing your problems, system instability is often the consequence of overclocking. I would not recommend screwing around with overclocking these days, it is almost always such a small gain in overall performance, that it is just not worth messing with.

 

If you really want to make your machine perform faster (in terms of faster application launching, overall more responsive desktop), then the top two things to consider are: do you have enough ram? and how fast is your hard drive.

 

If you don't already have 2gigs ram on a 32bit system, then this would likely be your best upgrade. Most likely increase your performance more than any overclock.

 

If you want really fast desktop then get 2 HDs and use raid0. Many MBs are already equipped with raid0 and raid1. If you are so equipped, then using raid0 striping can increase the responsiveness of your machine dramatically. You do however double the risk of loosing data in a HD crash, because either HD crashing will cause all your data to be lost. But as long as your data is well backed up or stored elsewhere, having the main OS on striped drive is a huge performance boost. Best thing I ever did to increase my desktop speed.

[deadman]

most of my system components are all stable, cpu, ram, hard drives! done the usual prime testing but the onboard network adaptor seems to go on/off once in a few days! i wonder if the heat blowing from the cpu is causing it?

[Jameson]

most of my system components are all stable, cpu, ram, hard drives! done the usual prime testing but the onboard network adaptor seems to go on/off once in a few days! i wonder if the heat blowing from the cpu is causing it?

 

Deadman, in all seriousness, I seriously doubt overclocking heat is the cause. Unless you can't even pick up your laptop cause it runs so hot. IMO your adapter is just on the edge of dying. I would get a USB Wireless network card and just disable your onboard one. They are very unreliable anyway. I almost always use Express cards because of that reason.

 

I have been doing IT for 7 years and this is just my opinion.

[deadman]

Deadman, in all seriousness, I seriously doubt overclocking heat is the cause. Unless you can't even pick up your laptop cause it runs so hot. IMO your adapter is just on the edge of dying. I would get a USB Wireless network card and just disable your onboard one. They are very unreliable anyway. I almost always use Express cards because of that reason.

 

I have been doing IT for 7 years and this is just my opinion.

yeh think so too so i stuck in another network card! i'll see how it goes.....