akiso said:
But by doing all those what do you achieve ultimately.
Extract the maximum out of our investment. Some do it just as a hobby taking hardware to its limits.
akiso said:
How much does your performance increase?
Substantially in most cases. My Overclocked quad in some tasks is equivalent to the performance of about 60 x Pentium 4 2.8GHz Workstations we have at office working in parallel. For ex: It takes about 40 min for 25 workstations at office working in parallel to compile our code base. The same gets done in 6.5 min on my overclocked rig at home. The performance in games is also substantial. A game which is barely giving playable frame rates may get a decent boost with overclocking.
akiso said:
What are the effect of it on the hardware?
As long as you are in the limits, you are safe. In my opinion, almost all Core 2 processors regardless of the rated speed can usually run at 3.5 GHz without any problems. Anything above that changes from processor to processor.
Extreme overclocking is fine for a benchmark run or two as such is the case when its a hobby. But such overclocks cannot be used for 24/7 use as you are feeding voltages substantially above the rated voltages for such overclocks. Very high voltages in damage the processor in the long run.
akiso said:
With kind of configuration some of you got anything will run smoothly. Then why do you go for OC. OC is also risky, am I correct or not.
As I said the goal of overclocking for most people is maximizing the performance out their hardware. As long as its done correctly, there is no harm even in the long run.
For example, I have benched my Quad core at 3.825 GHz, but it took decently high voltages to do that. So I am not running my processor at that clock for 24/7 use. But I was able to achieve 3.6GHz without a strain on my processor and so I am content with using that for my 24/7 use. On the other hand another member here found that he could do 3.8GHz without any strain on his processor, so he is using that clock for this 24/7 use.
