DescentBB

I'm planning on OC'ing my i7 920....but am wondering what kind of speed gain I'll get for games/every day use.
All the reviews say the i7 is super easy to over clock (though I dont know much about OCing...).
I dont need to see 4ghz, but I've read that 3.5 is a good 24/7 OC....and 3.8 doesnt even put a load
on it with the cooler I bought for it. (with arctic silver 5, some are posting 4ghz and cool--though I wonder if that's while gaming or under a load).


So I guess I'm wondering:
What's the speed difference between the stock 2.66
and say 3.5?

And is it worth it to push it to 3.8 if it's stable (as opposed to a lower clock like 3.2)?

I don't know much about OC'ing, just what I've read on the internet, but I'd think that at these frequencies you actually would need waveguides to contain the signal. I mean we are talking microwaves here. Running 4 ghz may be hazardous to your health.

flip wrote:I don't know much about OC'ing, just what I've read on the internet, but I'd think that at these frequencies you actually would need waveguides to contain the signal. I mean we are talking microwaves here. Running 4 ghz may be hazardous to your health.

Don't believe everything you read on the internet, the shielding that is your computers metal case is to protect the machine from outside radiation, not the other way around. (And most microwave ovens operate at 2450 MHz.)

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Yeah there are some performance improvements you could gain by overclocking the chip to 3.5 GHz or so. However the odds that you would require them, or even notice them in daily use are extremely questionable at best. The gains from overclocking really only show themselves when you are doing some serious processing with the system.

If all you do is casually play games, surf the web, and check your email; do not overclock your system. In most video games these days it won't show because they are GPU limited not CPU limited (even with that GTX 260 in there). In web surfing/email/office tasks the only difference would be the computer would spend even more time and cycles waiting for you. And it does impact the long term stability and lifespan of the computer.

Also I'm pretty sure you don't have the RAM for overclocking, you would want 2000+ MHz chips. Nor do you have the PSU for the job, overclocking makes the system draw dramatically more power (power does NOT scale linearly with clock speed).

wow! I would have thought that 1.2 more processing power would make a difference, but I appreciate your qualifier \"games these days\". No sense in limiting the life span of the CPU if I dont need the extra oomph.

Maybe in a year or so, things will change and I'll do a light OC at that point. The RAM does OC...I read a review of it on newegg where someone is getting 3.6 with the same ram/cpu, less of a cooler, and the corsair 620hx PSU.
With a better PSU (750w), things should work, right?
From what I've read 3.6 isnt all that much of an OC, though maybe a better OC would take better RAM (which isnt all that expensive, so if I needed more power I could switch out some ram down the road).

I'm w/ Krom, OC isn't worth it unless you really need the power (for infinite elements calculation eg.) In case you want to try, here's a guide.

flip wrote:I don't know much about OC'ing, just what I've read on the internet, but I'd think that at these frequencies you actually would need waveguides to contain the signal. I mean we are talking microwaves here. Running 4 ghz may be hazardous to your health.

heh thats actually kinda funny

im with Krom aswell.

Thanks for the guide Grendel. I think I'll definitely wait on the OC until its necessary. I waited way too long with this sytem that I have...and now an OC wont do much anyway.

here's a related question:
besides the number of cores, what's the difference in
speed from the cpu I have now (amd 4400 x2 @ 2.4 *I think*)
and the i7 920 (@2.66)?


is the speed difference because of architecture?
It used to be that you could tell the difference easily, like a p3 450, or a p3 550.. The mhz gave you an idea of the speed.
Now it's all so confusing...

and as an aside, why do so many OC their systems, especially pushing for the max the cpu will go, if it doesnt really affect that much? (--besides the obvious answer of \"Because they can\"--heh)

ReadyMan wrote:and as an aside, why do so many OC their systems, especially pushing for the max the cpu will go, if it doesnt really affect that much?

Bragging rights.

What it can help in is demanding tasks like transcoding video, so people who rip and encode DVDs for home theater PCs can benefit a lot from overclocking. Also compressing and decompressing just plain old zip/rar/etc files can go a bit faster (although file compression is mostly I/O limited). Some games can show improvements, although the GPU usually limits the gains you get from CPU overclocks to insignificant or entirely unnoticeable levels. The OS and games/other larger programs may load a bit faster, although not the difference a faster hard drive would make.

If you dive into business uses: people who do rendering, photography retouching/image processing, 3d art, CAD, etc can usually appreciate the extra power. Game designers and level authors can definitely use it when they are running the lighting calculations for a map. Software developers can compile and run their programs faster, working with/doing things to databases large and small can go faster (assuming it isn't I/O limited).

What doesn't benefit from overclocking is stuff like the average users word processing, sending and receiving email, displaying and scrolling through most web pages, playing music or just running an operating system. Modern CPUs have pretty much been extreme overkill for tasks like that for the last 5 years.

Don't believe everything you read on the internet, the shielding that is your computers metal case is to protect the machine from outside radiation, not the other way around. (And most microwave ovens operate at 2450 MHz.)

That is exactly my point and has nothing to do with overclocking itself, so I guess this is a mini hijack . 4 GHZ frequencies are still microwaves and at that frequency RF signals no longer stay confined to wires and emit tons of spurious signals (thus the need for waveguides).
I KNOW this is a fact concerning Ham Radio and there are exposure time limits and power limitations involved when operating at those frequencies. Just kinda makes me wonder if someone should make the same observations concerning computers too.

I was thinking that my next purchase (way down the road) should be a better HD. I've got a 7200rpm HD, so a raptor (or would a velociraptor be better) would speed things up. That's probably the bottleneck in my system now, right?

Skip the Raptors, if its some time down the road plan and aim for a Intel (or other high end) SSD. The current top end SSDs annihilate the performance of anything that can be done with traditional mechanical drives.

You will still need a traditional hard drive around for bulk storage if you use a SSD since they aren't as big as hard drives yet. For the full benefits I would use a 120 GB SSD to boot from and install games/programs on, and a 1+ TB HDD for storing media files, downloads, disk images, etc.

Sorry for the Noob questions, but what is an SSD?
I think I saw support for that on the asus deluxe mb, but I didnt order the deluxe, I ordered the standard (dont think it has ssd support, but I can check)

Solid State Drive

Instead of a hard drive with spinning disks and read heads, it is a drive made up of a bunch of flash memory. Because they have no moving parts they require less power than mechanical hard drives, they don't get as hot, and they are also much faster.

wow!
Will it run in any system, or is a specific mb needed for it?


Newegg has a bunch of them, but almost all of them are 12.5\" drives. Is this for laptops?
These are much cheaper than the regular ones.
$370 for an 80gb is a lot.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820167005

$160 for a VelociRaptor w/ 150GB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136296


Hopefully the price will come down on the SSD...

Yeah it will run on any system, no special boards or chipsets are required. They are designed with laptops in mind, but that is just because there was no point to making them 3.5\" for desktops when 2.5\" would work in both desktops and laptops. Easier to design one drive for both and just use a 2.5\" to 3.5\" cheap bracket to mount it in a desktop.

Just stay away from the cheap ones (the Intel ones are all fine though) since virtually all of them use MLC flash and the only controller for it is a JMicron controller that has a serious bug with small random writes that can cause the system to stall for a whole second just from sending an instant message or other tiny stuff like that.

Although I should mention that Vista and Windows 7 have extra optimizations for flash SSD drives that XP does not have. And you should never defragment a SSD (both pointless and increases wear).