Should i overclock my i5 3550?

[asmari]

WIll i see a difference in my gaming if i overclock my 3550 to like 3.8?

Would it be risky?

OR should i save up some money and upgrade to a i5 3570k?

my specs: Mobo: AsRock Z77 Extreme 4

CPU: Intel i5 3550 3.3ghz (3.7 turbo boost)

GPU: Gigabyte hd 7870 oc

Ram: 8gb corsair vengeance

SSD: Crucial 64gb

HDD 1tb caviar black

PSU: 600w corsair

[tp95112]

It would but going up by 500Mhz is a big jump. Especially being a ivy bridge your gonig to get some high temperatures. Do you have a after market cooler?

[mvitkun]

no you would not see any difference.at all.

why?

you'd be raising it 100mhz,or .1ghz.

though the resulting turbo clock would be ~4.3ghz and that would make a significant difference,though thats impossible to achieve since the multiplier on the 3550 is locked,and the only other way is the FSB/BCLK.

the BCLK (base clock) on lga 1155 only goes up to like 105mhz typically,whereas to reach 3.8ghz from the stock 3.3ghz you'd need to raise the BCLK to 115mhz.

so the max clock you'd be able to achieve,assuming your board reaches 105mhz BCLK,would be ~3.5ghz (and ~3.9ghz turbo).

also since OC'ing the BCLK overclocks the entire motherboard (cpu and ram,not sure if it affects anything else) I would say you shouldn't overclock the cpu at all.

should you buy a 3570K?I would say that unless you can unload the 3550 for almost full price it wouldn't be worth it,unless of course you have a microcenter near you and can buy the 3570K for 189.99.then I would say buy it,because the used 3550 can go for $150-$170 meaning you'd only lose $20-$40,whereas otherwise you'd have to throw in about $60-$80.

[asmari]

i think i was wrong saying i can OC to 3.8.

The asrock extreme tuning utlity says im at a 36 cpu ration and i can raise it to a 41.

What would my clock speed be at if the ratio is at 41?

[mvitkun]

lol forgot about the "limited" overclock thing that non-K chips have.

if you raise each core to the max that it allows in the bios you'll have this

core1:

4.1ghz

core2:

4ghz

core3:

3.9ghz

core4:

3.8ghz

are you using the stock heatsink?because if you are, at 4.1ghz it probably won't be able to keep up with the temps.

I'd say raise the turbo frequencies IN THE BIOS to 41,40,39,38 which is the max that it should accept.

and change the cpu vcore from Auto to Fixed and then change the value to 1.2v .

then run prime95,and use small FFT,run it for ~4 hours (the longer it's run the more confidence you can have in it being stable)

if the computer freezes up,BSODs,or if it makes an error in prime95 and one of the workers is stopped raise the voltage one step (.01v)

so if it's at 1.2 raise it to 1.21,and so forth.

and keep raising it until it gets stable.I wouldn't raise it much higher than 1.3v.

if it's stable at 1.2v then I'd try to lower it by 1 step and see how low it can go so that you get lower temps.

if the temps go above 80C (during prime95) at the lowest stable voltage then I'd lower the clock speed by 100mhz and see if you can get the voltage lower,because 80C is not a good temp.