Is overclocking over?

extremetech.com

I guess the age of overclocking is kind of over. There are some people out there that want to push their systems to their limits and also want more bang for their buck. I remember back in the day when I was still a young lad and into building PCs, that was all that I cared about. Considering now that we have CPUs with multiple cores, larger memory capacities, better graphics cards etc, the edge in performance that overclocking allows doesn't matter as much. We have to also consider that prices have changed in terms of what you can get for your money. I remember my parents buying me a Pentium 3 500 with 128MB of RAM and a CD Burner for $3000 back in the day. For $3000 now, you can get something really amazing.

Games are less and less CPU-bound these days as well. A mediocre Core 2 Duo paired with the latest ATI/nVidia GPU can run pretty much anything out there (I speak from experience).

Overclocking still has its benefits; you can save quite a bit of cash by overclocking your 16-slice home render farm or video encoding rig. This is especially apparent in Intel land, where they charge a $600 markup between the second-best and absolute best CPU they offer.

> I remember my parents buying me a Pentium 3 500 with 128MB of RAM and a CD Burner for $3000 back in the day. For $3000 now, you can get something really amazing.

That setup itself was pretty amazing back in the day :P

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