Overclocking = future proofing?

[VelikiPCguy]

Obviously with the way tech develops, even the best possible PC you can get right now will be updated (to an extent) even by next year, let alone in 5 - 10 years. So once you notice your formerly beast PC being slowly but surely outshined, and you don't feel like buying new parts, can overclocking squeeze some more life out of them? Will it reduce longevity?

[WereCatf]

2 minutes ago, NewwGuyy123 said:

can overclocking squeeze some more life out of them?

You can't really get that much performance out of overclocking. A small bump, sure, but it's not any sort of a panacea. Besides which, it'd be idiotic to buy overclockable hardware and then wait with overclocking until the system isn't fast enough anymore -- either overclock from the get-go, or don't bother.

4 minutes ago, NewwGuyy123 said:

Will it reduce longevity?

Only, if you push voltages to unsafe levels and you're constantly riding on the red line with thermals.

[Action_Johnson]

Overclocking is not future proofing. The idea that an OC can stave off an upgrade, is unrealistic and in general not really worth it. At best without going LN2, you'll get a 10% performance boost.

 

That's the difference between 30 and 33fps.. not exactly meaningful or noticeable. 

[RejZoR]

That used to be the case. You bought a cheapo CPU or graphic card and overclocked the hell out of it. Those days are basically gone now as automatic boosting systems achieve similar effect without any user intervention. Only thing that helps is raising power limits and deliver better cooling. With CPU's, all core overclocks are a mixed bag, it can help with computational workloads, but for games it's usually better to let it boost by itself. Graphic cards, you may gain some, but only really on VRAM side. And even there you have to be careful coz it's ECC VRAM and if you're not careful you can actually hurt performance while it'll look like everything is fine.

[Spindel]

28 minutes ago, Action_Johnson said:

Overclocking is not future proofing. The idea that an OC can stave off an upgrade, is unrealistic and in general not really worth it. At best without going LN2, you'll get a 10% performance boost.

 

That's the difference between 30 and 33fps.. not exactly meaningful or noticeable. 

Man I remember back in the days when I got a 30% OC with small means (using a pencil to bridge 2 connector on the CPU) and an air cooler out of a AMD Duron (600 MHz -> 800 MHz).

 

But yeah not future proofing, just getting the performance of more expensive components out of cheap components.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, NewwGuyy123 said:

Obviously with the way tech develops, even the best possible PC you can get right now will be updated (to an extent) even by next year, let alone in 5 - 10 years. So once you notice your formerly beast PC being slowly but surely outshined, and you don't feel like buying new parts, can overclocking squeeze some more life out of them? Will it reduce longevity?

Once upon a time it could.  One used to be able to find 30-50% with an overclock.  The problem is these days it’s more like 10% so a little but not a lot.

[NineEyeRon]

OC these days is really just a hobby thing, you probably already have top tier components if your are OCing so futureproofing is not the focus.

 

10-15 years ago OCing could get you extra time but just not now, nothing from the last 3 years needs it.