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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

> In the old days that would be true but nowadays OC is so mainstream

I do not agree with this statement. If anything, overclocking is less prevalent than ever before, despite what all of the LTT's and friends make videos about.

The reality is modern CPU's are crazy fast, and auto-overclock (boost/burst) all on their own. There's little reason to push the CPU's further - and more significant gains can be had much safer by upgrading CPU generations than squeezing out a few extra percent of performance in benchmarks.

There will always be enthusiasts that want to overclock - but I don't think we can consider overclocking mainstream.

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LTT has repeatedly said that overclocking under normal circumstances has been worth less and less as GPUs and CPUs have been increasingly built to ride thermal and power limits at stock. And that overclocking can even hurt performance by disabling that behavior.

For CPU clock, I agree the gains are marginal, yet BIOS settings still allow the end user to trivially further bump up the clock. There are young people with a lot of time on their hands who will do it for that 3% uplift.

Further, with memory we have things like XMP which again are blessed by the vendors and are 100% within the definition of overclocking. Just because a memory module can run at XMP rates doesn't mean the motherboard or the CPU have the signal integrity or power integrity margins to support the timings. And this is something component vendors can't optimize from the factory (only system vendors can), because it depends on multiple parts.

In the old days one couldn't enter BIOS setup and find even a single mention of overclocking, and the term itself was taboo because it meant operating the system outside the design spec. Nowadays a lot of vendors use OC in marketing. I think this alone makes my point about being mainstream.

In a way, OC is absolutely mainstream now. It's now integrated into the product itself, which dynamically clocks itself depending on thermal headroom.

There's thus minimal need for users to do any manual overclocking any more.

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