Um... ok well overclocking RAM gives you maybe a 1% boost in speed and it's very complicated, but overclocking the CPU and GPU gives very large benefits. GPU can gain you up to 10 fps as well as less frame drops and faster loading times while gaming, and CPU isn't as important to gaming, but in terms of raw computing power it can be massively increased. At 2.66ghz the max theoretical computing power of my core is 16x2.66 = 42.56gigaflops, and generally you run 8-10% below that. At 3.8ghz my CPU benchmarked at 55.6gigaflops, which is a nice big boost of about 25%. Not necessary unless I'm going to crunch some big numbers (which is how benchmarks work). If going with really high end cards or a crossfire/sli set up, the CPU can quickly become the limiting factor of how well your games run.Le Tueur said:
There's a lot of fear about burning out your PC, but depending what you buy that's often a non issue. I bought high end stuff that can handle it so the only way I can fry it is extreme over heating or over volting, which taking a little caution makes a non issue.
And like anything of quality, PC equipment is built for far higher standards than it sees at stock. Light overclocks won't make it die any sooner, and big overclocks might shave a year off a 5 year life at most, barring any big mishaps. With only barely boosting voltages (1.15->1.18 vcore, 1.1->1.17 VTT) I went up a full 1 ghz because stock settings are actually underclocked.
Only a month ago the only thing I knew about overclocking was that it made PCs "go faster" but there's plenty of good info out there if you're interested in it. First step tho is to find out just what components are in your PC and if they're overclock worthy to begin with. My old PC was a bought package with a basic motherboard and I doubt I could have overclocked it at all.
