Am I not an enthusiast if I don't overclock?

Sauron · July 9, 2016

21 minutes ago, Kilobytez95 said:

It all depends on what you think an "enthusiast" is. For some just liking something is enough to be considered an enthusiast but for others it's you buy top end hardware and overclock it. personally I think if you're passionate about something then you're an enthusiast whether or not you have a 6950X.

Being an enthusiast means being interested in learning more about something and dedicating time (regardless of how much time) to it. With knowledge comes craving for better parts and the urge to tinker but they aren't necessary to the learning process.

Okjoek · July 9, 2016

3 hours ago, Unimportant said:

1) Current PC's are fast enough to run most things @ stock speed so overclocking is not really required anymore. Back in the old days even the fast expensive pc's were too slow to run some stuff and overclocking really helped, i feel those days are somewhat gone now.

I think the slow PC market could account for this somewhat. It has occured to me that efficiency is also on the minds of the chip manufacturers where I'm seeing great leaps in power savings moving onto the 14nm processes. Performance is still increasing, but it appears to be doing so in smaller increments these days. My hypothesis is that it's this way because AMD is still playing catch up with Intel and without competition Intel is releasing products very slowly to milk the monopoly while they have it. As a result Video Game developers have had a long time to catch up with this slow growth of CPU performance and in a lot of ways PC gaming has become much simpler with the rise of Esports games that run on potatoes and the sort of renaissance of old-school designed games like Undertale, minecraft and Shovel Knight. Mainstream gamers benefit greatly from this system where PC hardware performance grows slowly and game developers faced with competition make it their job to make games that run on as much hardware as possible.

I'm personally rooting for Team Red after watching some of AdoredTV's videos.

I do disagree with a lot of their strategies though. I don't like how heavily they've gone into making APUs. I don't find them particularly necessary over having a dedicated GPU. Another thing I don't like is how they're pushing for VR which in my opinion isn't a very high demand feature. Atleast I'm not that eager for it, but who knows maybe it's a stepping stone for the holodeck. Atleast I like their new marketing for the new RX series GPU where they target the mainstream where as Adored put it ~85% of the GPU market shops for under 300 dollars. And with their new marketing scheme in Soviet AMD, graphics process you! I hope the new Zen architecture goes along the lines of what I've read about with their 28nm chips where efficiency is high and they draw low power, just with less APU junk that I don't need. Because as I said before if I had money burning holes in my wallet I'd love to make an FM2+ rig with low power draw and it would put my old prebuilt with an Athlon B28 CPU on the 45nm process to shame in both performance and efficiency.