Overclock necesary for gaming?

[Kogumaru]

so thats the question, im really noob with the overclock so its necesary? or change my MOBO for a non oc mobo

[3 Lions]

Yes you can basically get a free upgrade by overclocking. 

[manikyath]

Just now, LinusTechTipsFanFromDarlo said:

Yes you can basically get a free upgrade by overclocking. 

but that's not a necessity tho.. it's some free extra performance for the cases where it can come in handy.. but "a necessity" would mean things were unplayable without.

[oDoyoleRules69]

17 minutes ago, Kogumaru said:

so thats the question, im really noob with the overclock so its necesary? or change my MOBO for a non oc mobo

If you don't overclock you chip, it will stay at stock operating speeds.  You don't need to change your motherboard to not overclock.  You post is quite confusing BTW.  Overclocking is not necessary, but if you can overclock, you should as it doesn't harm anything, just gives you a little more FPS in games

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, oDoyoleRules69 said:

 You post is quite confusing BTW.

guessing that's because he's unsure about what he's even on about, and a friend probably just told him he "had" to overclock to make his games run well or something.

[DocSwag]

Specs?

[Kogumaru]

17 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Specs?

i7 6700k
asus maximus impact viii

16 gb ram

cooler corsair h55

PSU evga 500w Gold

[DocSwag]

1 minute ago, Kogumaru said:

i7 6700k
asus maximus impact viii

16 gb ram

cooler corsair h55

PSU evga 500w Gold

What GPU tho

[Kogumaru]

1 minute ago, DocSwag said:

What GPU tho

EVGA superclocked 1080

[DocSwag]

Just now, Kogumaru said:

EVGA superclocked 1080

I think you should probably OC. Even a conservative one would help (on CPU and gpu)

[Terryv]

I've found that overclocking is rarely worth the extra cost and effort. Nothing I've ever OC'd ever gave more than a few % improvement (excluding synthetic tests). I'd rather spend that extra money on a better CPU, GPU, etc.

[oDoyoleRules69]

If you don't know what you're doing, don't bother.  Your system is plenty powerful for anything you would ever want to do, right out of the box.  

[pyrojoe34]

Is it necessary? No, but you're leaving free performance on the table if you don't. It also depends on if you need it or not. If you never use more than half the power anyway then I wouldn't bother. Your system is well balanced so you probably don't really need to for just gaming.

If you decide to there's no reason to push for max OC off the bat so your best bet is to learn a bit about it and settle for a mild/safe OC with near-zero risk. Most chips will give you at least a 10-20% increase in raw performance with what would be considered a very conservative OC.

 

You can always just wait on it until you notice it's a limiting factor (maybe a few years down the road when you upgrade the GPU or games are more CPU intensive) and at that point, because the hardware is older, it's not as worrying to play around with as a brand new chip you just bought.

[Emberstone]

As others have said, it's basically free performance. I used to be pretty afraid of breaking my stuff when overclocking, but I learned both from asking questions on the Internet and my own experience that, as long as you stick to safe guidelines, you won't harm anything.

 

Overclocking my 1600X to 4.0 GHz gave a nice boost in heavily single-threaded games like Heroes of the Storm or World of Warcraft. Overclocking won't matter in cases where you're GPU-limited, however, so keep that in mind.

 

As for the guidelines I mentioned, here are mine: keep temps beneath 80 C when under a realistic load (currently I hit 81 C max in Prime95 at 1.337v), stay below 1.425v for Ryzen, and for Intel chips read the spec sheet to determine what Intel says is the maximum safe voltage for it. For example, my i7-980X's spec sheet on Ark says not to go higher than 1.35v, so I achieved an OC of 4.0 GHz at 1.34v on that chip.