Overclcoking Vs. Not Overclocking?

[z123killer]

what are the pros and cons of overclocking vs not overclocking? how much gaming performance can you get by overclocking both the cpu and gpu?

[Enderman]

more heat

how much performance depends on the OC and the game

[Misanthrope]

It is noticeable on both. Usually you can get 5 to 10% bonus performance depends on your luck and cooling solutions. As to whenever or not it might be noticeable depends on what you're doing: for gaming, CPU overclocks on AMD are almost a necessity and on intel on the other hand are almost irrelevant. On other computer tasks however, CPU overclocks dramatically affect performance i.e. rendering video.

 

GPU overclocks for games almost always nets you some performance advantage but remember than many cards already come factory overclocked and/or have auto overlclocking anyway and the gains you'd get from manual overclocks are negligible at best. 

[AresKrieger]

To be very simple

Pros-faster---> depends on what your OCing and what game your running how much gain you get.

 

Cons- Heat and power usage go up

[z123killer]

It is noticeable on both. Usually you can get 5 to 10% bonus performance depends on your luck and cooling solutions. As to whenever or not it might be noticeable depends on what you're doing: for gaming, CPU overclocks on AMD are almost a necessity and on intel on the other hand are almost irrelevant. On other computer tasks however, CPU overclocks dramatically affect performance i.e. rendering video.

 

GPU overclocks for games almost always nets you some performance advantage but remember than many cards already come factory overclocked and/or have auto overlclocking anyway and the gains you'd get from manual overclocks are negligible at best. 

I am looking to build a pc that has an Athlon 860k and a 380 would i gain noticeable performance on AAA titles ?

[Misanthrope]

I am looking to build a pc that has an Athlon 860k and a 380 would i gain noticeable performance on AAA titles ?

 

Quite: AMD chips are behind times in single core performance which is really important for AAA games so you'd be well advised to get a reasonable AIO cooler or hefty air cooler and case and push it hard. An overclocked 860k might end up being close to an i3 which makes all games playable and a good experience but it does depend on getting a good overclock, stock clocks will probably put you below most mid range cards (380 or 960 and such) and affect performance:

 

[z123killer]

Quite: AMD chips are behind times in single core performance which is really important for AAA games so you'd be well advised to get a reasonable AIO cooler or hefty air cooler and case and push it hard. An overclocked 860k might end up being close to an i3 which makes all games playable and a good experience but it does depend on getting a good overclock, stock clocks will probably put you below most mid range cards (380 or 960 and such) and affect performance:

 

would i be better getting the Pentium and overclocking it?

[Misanthrope]

would i be better getting the Pentium and overclocking it?

 

Not really: the Pentium G3258 is a dual core chip. Most games won't mind but some newer games like Farcry 4 don't even launch on a dual core chip anymore. So even though the performance on the Pentium is far greater I'd still hessitate to recommend it. It works just fine for 99% of games out there but we just don't know in say a year or two if more games will refuse to run on dual cores.

 

If you really don't want to think about any issues with not enough cores or not enough overclocks the way to go is an i3. It is more money but it's 2 cores hyperthreaded (shows in windows as 4 cores so no restrictions on games) particularly because it's also upgradeable to something else without investing in a new motherboard and such, something that you will need to do if you go AMD right now they won't release any more FM2 or AM3 chips.

[LogicalDrm]

Overclocking has little effect if you are using current gen hardware to run current gen games. It becomes more important when you have few year old hardware and you are trying to get better performance in newer games. It depends on game how much better performance gets.

Cons would be more heat, little shorter lifetime for components involved, higher power requirements and noise from coolers.

[Goat]

Pros of overclocking: Better performance for free

                                  Makes your hardware performance last longer in the future

                                  Satisfying

  

Cons of overclocking: More heat if hardware is not adequately cooled

                                   May shorten the lifespan of hardware ( even more so if there is not enough cooling )

 

Overclocking is worth a try to get more performance out of your system. I have overclocked my GTX 970 and have gotten 10fps extra in the Heaven benchmark and more performance in games like Witcher 3. I have overclocked my i5 4690k to 4.5ghz but so far I didn't really see a performance gain in games.