CPU Overclocking Headroom

[Shiruxriu]

Okay so the title give a hint but complicated questions ho.

What exactly determines a CPU's ability to overclock? 

What determines a CPU's overclocking headroom?

Are there special cases where overclocking is seen as unnecessary?

[Rainbow Dash]

15 minutes ago, Shiruxriu said:

What exactly determines a CPU's ability to overclock? 

The silicon of the CPU is the main one, the motherboard power phases determine the power delivery, a good psu that won't explode from overclocking and set your house on fire, and the cooler to keep it from melting.

15 minutes ago, Shiruxriu said:

What determines a CPU's overclocking headroom?

The max safe voltage, and temperature.

15 minutes ago, Shiruxriu said:

Are there special cases where overclocking is seen as unnecessary?

When you are overclocking a low end CPU, such as the G3258, to play games such as Battlefield 1, which won't do it any better. Other than that, overclocking is seen as a hobby or for fun to push your chip to it's potential to set records. The other one is if you are overclocking a CPU that would see only a 10% increase in performance and you are pushing it to the edge, like the FX 8350, overclocks well, eats way too much power, turns your pc into a heater in the winter, and too little gains in real-world scenarios.

[Shiruxriu]

9 minutes ago, Rainbow Dash said:

The silicon of the CPU is the main one, the motherboard power phases determine the power delivery, a good psu that won't explode from overclocking and set your house on fire, and the cooler to keep it from melting.

The max safe voltage, and temperature.

When you are overclocking a low end CPU, such as the G3258, to play games such as Battlefield 1, which won't do it any better. Other than that, overclocking is seen as a hobby or for fun to push your chip to it's potential to set records. The other one is if you are overclocking a CPU that would see only a 10% increase in performance and you are pushing it to the edge, like the FX 8350, overclocks well, eats way too much power, turns your pc into a heater in the winter, and too little gains in real-world scenarios.

Okay, then from there, with more modern cpus such as the 8700k 8600k 2700x and 2600x, why is so much emphassis of performance put into overclocked CPUs?

[Rainbow Dash]

8 minutes ago, Shiruxriu said:

Okay, then from there, with more modern cpus such as the 8700k 8600k 2700x and 2600x, why is so much emphassis of performance put into overclocked CPUs?

The design of the CPUs are a lot different, with more cores, lower power consumption, and performance per core. So when you overclock those CPUs you will see a more larger performance jump.

[Shiruxriu]

6 minutes ago, Rainbow Dash said:

The design of the CPUs are a lot different, with more cores, lower power consumption, and performance per core. So when you overclock those CPUs you will see a more larger performance jump.

Okay, and so in that regard is the physical construction of a cpu a more limiting factor to overclocking, or is it a large combination of smaller factors.

[Rainbow Dash]

1 minute ago, Shiruxriu said:

Okay, and so in that regard is the physical construction of a cpu a more limiting factor to overclocking, or is it a large combination of smaller factors.

Well I'm not a computer engineer, so getting into the more complex stuff with CPU design is not in my range of knowledge. But what I do know is that the smaller the design of the CPU die would allow shorter distances for data to travel inside the CPU, but that shouldn't limit overclocking. The things of a CPU design that limits overclocking is the manufacturing of the silicon, as a wafer is made, but tiny imperfections inside the CPU such as the pipelines that carry the data through the CPU could be weaker than the design specs resulting in requiring more electrical current to run at a set freq., and the other thing that Intel gets criticised for is the thermal paste between the IHS and the CPU die itself which really doesn't work almost all the time, while AMD just solders their CPU and IHS together which makes it better to dissipate heat. I know for a fact that both Intel and AMD test some of the silicon to see if they are up to specs, if not they will either be thrown into the trash or marked as a lower end CPU.