Would I see any gaming benefit to ocerclocking my 4790k?

[turaven]

I finally got around to ditching the stock cooler on my 4790k, so now overclocking it is a possibility, and it will at least not be limited from full turbo speeds due to thermals.

 

I've seen many people around say that a 4790k isn't going to be a bottleneck for gaming in a system, even if you have a ludicrous setup like quad Titan X's, but they don't mention any overclocks in such statements. I don't do any kind of rendering work or whatnot, so the heaviest load my computer will see (at least for now) is games.

 

Would overclocking it from the stock 4.0-4.4GHz yield and increased performance in games? If not, I'd feel it's not worth the trouble of making sure the overclock is stable, dealing with increased heat/power draw, and having to potentially tinker with Windows power settings to prevent it from running at maximum speed even when the system is idle.

 

For reference, I just got a second GTX 980, so I don't want my performance to be artificially low because of my CPU, and I'm running games at 3440x1440, although I think that higher resolution monitors mostly just tax the GPU more (or even exclusively tax the GPU more).

[Elapo]

Not yet. Maybe for very CPU intensive games in the future.

[DimasRMDO]

snip

It "can" but overclocking your GPU makes more sense. For gaming, you'll see more benefit by overclocking your GPU, unless the game is CPU intensive.

[rtpb5642]

Maybe a bit more performance gain on cpu intensive games.

[vembutech]

May be overclocking your GPU can get you some performance gain.

[turaven]

It "can" but overclocking your GPU makes more sense.

Probably. I have two EVGA "Superclocked" 980's, which already have a pretty modest overclock out of the box, and they run at like 80 degrees under 80-90% load, so I'm not too keen on pushing them any further. I could boost the fan speeds way up, but my radiator fans are already loud as as hell, so adding the sound of a jet turbine into the mix would probably be more annoying than it's worth.

 

In the end, my primary concern is that my non-OC'd processor isn't holding back $1,000 worth of GPU.

[Dzzope]

It totally depends on the game.

You could see anything from 0% improvement to 15-20% improvement if the game is particularly CPU heavy.

 

You need to look at reviews and benchmarks for the games you play and then decide if you will get any benefit or if it's worth it (I know some games really heavy on CPU that aren't graphically challenging and thus with a beefy chip anyway you could go from 300FPS to 360.. 

 

Gotta take it on a case by case basis. Personally, thats exactly why I'm running my 3770k at stock at the mo,