What is the point of overclocking you cpu?

[liilMatt]

Why overclock your cpu? I understand that years ago there was a need to overclock to keep up with modern games. But in my case (no pun intended), I have an i5 2500k. at 3.3 ghz, with stock overclocking a bit higher. With speeds like that, I've heard that for nearly all games there is very little point to overclocking - is this true? If there are games out there that will higher clock speeds, what are they. Or are there just some applications that better utilize the processing power that I am just overlooking?

 

There more thorough and technical the better!

 

I only ask this because there do not seem to be many resources on the internet indicating why we do it, only that as gamers we do it.

 

[NeatSquidYT]

It's just faster. In games, it may not matter TOO much, but in other applications such as rendering it can be pretty handy

[Comessy]

Higher clock speed = higher performance

 

Simple as that

[GlassBomb]

It's to make it slightly faster. A lot like how some people tune their cars to be faster.

 

Many enthusiasts love to tinker with their toys.

[C0LL0SS0S]

2-8 FPS in most games, if the CPU was the bottleneck

[LukaP]

 

for normal use, honestly, not a lot. The only apps that linearly scale with frequency are renderers

[Thought]

There's really no other way to put it than this.

[Albatross]

Performance, of course!

 

I actually saw a huge performance after I oc'd my CPU for games.

[zappian]

Its fun as hell. I prefer gpus however , I find it a lot easier to overclock them.

 

[trued_2]

Overclocking helps alot when programs only use 1 core/thread, where the speed reduces the perception of a bottle neck.

[D3MON]

some single threaded games benefit from overclocking, unfortunately these games usually have a minimum requirement of a pentium 4 so even stock modern cpus are way overkill, also if they're single threaded a pentium g3258 will typically overclock higher and get more performance than a 4790k in those games.
modern game engines with decent multithreading support dont benefit from overclocking much because they are designed to make the gpu the limit.(who wants to buy a titanx for your cpu to be limiting it to 50% while core 1 is pinned at 100%), thats likely what you mean.
rendering and transcoding etc which uses all of your cpu will have huge benefits from overclocking much like single threaded games do, unfortunately in those tasks even a bulldozer 8 core would beat your more expensive i5, while many people rant about how an i3 can beat an fx8 in a few select games (while mindfully ignorant of the fact a g3258 would beat the i3) they dont take into account anything productive requiring actual cpu power otherwise we'd all have i3's.
if i ever come across anything single threaded i have a g3258 for that and for real work i have my fx8 both come to less than a 3770k originally cost and gets similar performance, its horses for courses.
edit-heres some example's

frostbite is one of the best game engines in terms of using a cpu+gpu as well as it can

tomb raider is another example of a great game engine that doesnt mind if you have an i3 or a 3930k.

watchdogs isnt that bad either though amd might be 3fps behind at stock

dying light is single threaded but not demanding, when you have a fx6350 beating an 8350 something is wrong

splinter cell is known to be a POS and if you have a stock i3 or i5 at 3ghz you'll be losing performance, just because they got lazy

[KemoKa]

Overclocking is done when you need the extra horsepower. In both single and multi-threaded applications, you will see quite a large benefit depending on how high you go. Most processors these days are capable of going to about 4.7GHz. While that's only 300MHz faster than turbo on a 4790K, it's still impressive on other processors like the 2600K and the naturally lower-clocked i5s. In any case, your computer kind of turns into a monster most of the time. a hot, unstable monster.

It's not really necessary for gaming unless you have a small bottleneck from your CPU, so most hardcore gamers overclock for the e-peen. Basically we overclock because (and I can't believe this hasn't been posted yet)