Talk:Overclocking

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Computing Mid‑importance

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Software: Computing

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Todo / Content addition ideas

Efficiency and physics:

- Leakage, and effects of temperature on it

- Voltage/Frequency Curve

- Implications of speed of light on chip area / high clocks

- Maybe a few sentences on the heat dissipation problem caused by ever increasing transistor density, (e.g., the heat literally can’t leave the silicon quick enough).

Related concepts to discuss / See also:

- Dynamic clock boosting

- Electromigration

- Diminishing return (I can only find this link to the economic theory, not one in general) 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 11:16, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

ASIC Quality, link to semiconductor yield / production variation / binning 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 11:17, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

…I’m even thinking about mentioning melting 12-pin connectors in a passing sentence - it kind of got some attention in videogame magazines… 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 11:19, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@IrisChronomia Thanks. This article needs some serious work. BorgQueen (talk) 11:21, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@IrisChronomia BTW, is it true that only Intel CPUs with a K or KF suffix (e.g. i7-13700K) are unlocked for overclocking and other Intel CPUs can’t be overclocked? BorgQueen (talk) 11:58, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It would be harder (often close to impossible) to overclock non-K variants, yes. CPU's clock rate is decided by base clock x multiplier, and non-K variants have the latter locked to its certified max value. One can still overclock it with base clock, but it's more difficult and can only achieve minor frequency gains. _{Because the base clock designates the speed of which everything on the motherboard runs at, increasing it stresses far more parts than just the CPU, and said parts are frequently not designed with overclock-ability in mind. Using multiplier can make a CPU run e.g., 25% faster with good cooling, but on modern systems changing the base clock maxes out at (probably) 10%.} 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 12:55, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Potentially useful citations (Academic papers)

1 - 2005 - OR - IBM's early paper on what we now call boosting. Provides a pretty comprehensive overview on limiting factors of clockspeeds.

Comment / Source 2

An opinion piece written by the chief architect of Pentium 2/3/4. Though long outdated, some of the rationale and principles highlighted still stands. The line between 'stock' and 'overclocked' in modern systems is becoming increasingly blurred - take for example, the dynamic boost in Nvidia Maxwell+ / AMD RDNA+ GPUs, and (most extremely,) Intel Gen 13/14 Cores that permamently damage itself at default settings by running at transient Vcores up to 1.72V[1]. I don't think any run-of-the-mill overclocker would have the ball to even think about voltages higher than 1.45V.

2 - 2004 - Opinion piece - Rationale, principle, and a brief history (up until the time.

Comment / Source 5

Cold plate refers to the "classic" liquid cooling. It refers to the heat-conducting plate sticked to the processor, with liquid running through the inside of it to take away heat. The heated liquid is then transported to, and cooled by, radiators under airflow (average PC), or via evaporation in cooling towers (data centers drawing an industrial amount of energy ~~responding to ChatGPT prompts that people use to farm clicks and spam on Wikipedia~~).

3 - 2018 - Review - Citable for Pros/Cons; sans an explaination of implications of having performance bottlenecks.

4 - 2016 - OR - OC's impact on lifespan for a Haswell CPU.

5 - 2024 - OR review fusion - Comparison of Air cooling / Cold plates / Immersion cooling.

A1 - 2009 - OR - Citable for Pros/Cons; authors OC-ed a Conroe dual-core by 50%.

A2 - 2020 - OR - OC / Undervolting for power efficiency, with major focus on stability.

A3 - 2009 - OR review fusion - Process nodes, yield (manufacturing variation), DVFS, etc..

Quote collections

A3 - since the dynamic power consumption is proportional to the clock frequency and the supply voltage squared
A3 - peak temperature of a microprocessor is significantly reduced by the liquid cooling [...] The reliability of the VF-overclocking [over-voltage and over-frequency] scheme is significantly improved (more than twenty-four times) with the liquid cooling; however, it is still worsened as much as seventy times compared to the baseline scheme with the air cooling.

Trashcan

T1 "A Novel Optimization for GPU Mining Using Overclocking and Undervolting" 2022: In true published-by-MDPI fashion, the authors had the audacity to claim the novelty of a technique people are using since 2020 on Reddit, and to write about Crypto-mining.

A4 - 2007 - OR review fusion - Worst-case scenario designs, and how it leads to potential OC headroom, yield, binning and safety margins.

iris, posted 10:16, edited 11:27 UTC. 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 11:27, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed & BOLD Changes

1 / Changed / I don't get the reason for the disambiguation link to Odometer (=speedotmeter), the only link I can think of is its imagery depiction in advertisements on the topics of OCing; and I don't think they sound even remotely similar.

2 / Proposed / Maybe a good idea to update some of the images. Not that any of them has a problem, but all of them are depicting devices from c. 2000-2010, and e.g., motherboards and BIOS UIs looks more flashy and bling-bling-thingy now. 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 12:49, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

3 / Proposed / This earlier edit [2] removed 21KB worth of OR/uncited stuff. While it's reasonable, some of the removed text does worth a stay in the article (and the image description probably counts as routine calculation). We should probably go find those text some citations and restore some of them. 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 14:32, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]