Why Do People Oc?

[Oprime]

I have noticed that overclocking doesn't really do that much. I've only overclocked my computer cause of the fact that my Ram is not running stock. I've found that lowering the Latency and finding ways to increase bandwidth are the only ways to get more power. Having a AthlonXP 1800+ running at like 2.5Ghz doesn't do as much as 1 that has... low latency and high bandwidth Ram. I find that if a system isn't able to supply the bandwidth needed to the CPU the system is the reason for a bottleneck, but if it can then the CPU is the reason why.

What do you guys think about Overclocking?

[CK9]

ummm...42?  I've personally have never heard that term before...then again, i'm more of a risk to a server than a computer

[Hooman]

I think overclocking is largely pointless. Computers are usually fast enough to get what you want done. And if they're not, the small gains you get from overclocking probably aren't really gonna help much. Besides, you could kill your CPU doing it, and I don't really want to waste money buying a replacement CPU. If you want to risk it, why not just spend money on a better CPU in the first place? And yeah, I'd think RAM, harddrive speed, and the bottlenecks on the system bus are a bigger problem than CPU speed. Especially since CPU speeds have been increasing exponentially over the years, but RAM speeds have only increased linearly. Kinda makes things unbalanced right about now.
 

[TH300]

I don't overclock. My CPU is fast enough at normal speed and it'll live longer.

Since I don't have own expieriences with OCing I can't tell more. What I've read is that faster ram alone doesn't speed up the whole system much, but is rather of use when overclocking the cpu. The fsb shouldn't be a problem, since Intel and AMD both made it faster.

[BlackBox]

Yeah, I think OC'ing is mainly just a "see if I can do it" type of thing. I'd only really OC the CPU on old machines, 386s and the like, where I dont care if I burn up the CPU.

OCing the fsb is a little different, but then again you can't get much just from that alone. Not to say that the fsb cant be a bottleneck, since it can.

What makes the cut really is RAM lat, HD speed / cache size, CPU cache size.

I have OCed processors in smaller devices (eg Palm) but those are a different story since many of them are designed "scalable" -- low clocks, higher batt life, high clock, lower batt life
The Palm I use right now is the PalmOne Tungsten E, with a TI ARM OMAP311 cpu.

Factory settings, clock it at 126 Mhz. I've OC'ed it to 172 Mhz for doing stuff like watching movies etc, though I try to limit how much time is spent running OC'ed and am overall really cautious. TI says 172 is the max you should bring an OMAP311 up to, I dont go higher even though the OC'ing software it uses can bring it up to 185 Mhz.