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by apantel 814 days ago
It’s a sport. It’s like drag racing. Nobody is going to drive a drag racer to work, but that’s not the point of the car.
2 comments

Waste of cars. You want liquid nitromethane on your roads? Where's the utility?
liquid nitromethane commuting? in this economy? :D
"In this economy" snark? In this economy?
But at least drag racing is a spectacle. Not my thing, but it is a spectacle.

This? You push a button and a number comes up.

Are you sure you haven't visited hacker news by mistake?

Hardware overclocking requires a decent amount of knowledge, most of it obtainable only through months of trial and error, and a lot of tuning to push dozens of often conflicting parameters just right. Extreme overclocking requires that much more. If what they're doing is simply "pushing a button", then programming and system administration can be reduced to that too, along with many other things.

You simply can't get full performance from modern systems without some amount of overclocking, and things like PBO and XMP/EXPO profiles are far from what your hardware can achieve because they have to be very conservative, or many systems won't run without additional manual tuning, which most consumers won't do.

(Except for closed systems like Apple's where your hardware doesn't belong to you and you can't change anything anyway.)

So one immediate thing overclockers provide are general guidance on what you can expect to achieve and what thing to tune which way to get close to maximum performance from your hardware without spending months on it like they did. I heavily rely on such information. My system would be at least 25% slower if not for these "button pushers".

I wouldn't trust an overclocked system as a server or to compile. Especially not long term w degradation. Can't use it for CAD bc it'll mess up the PCIe timings I think. Looks like a giant waste of time and money to me, but sure to each their own. I bet it's difficult, but seems also pointless. If they were really knowledgeable they'd get out an FPGA and go design their own SoC instead of filing down intel's for a speed bump. Just not relevant today
Again bringing it back to the drag racing analogy… you wouldn’t commute to work in a drag racer. Thats not the point. The point is to push the hardware to the point of absurdity, just like drag racing. If extreme overlocking isn’t for you then that’s fine.
PCIe issues are only really a thing with BCLK overclocking on systems that lack a secondary external clock generator. BCLK overclocking is a pretty uncommon practice that isn’t practical for day to day usage.
Benchmarking hardware has been a thing forever, and applies to a vast swathe of things. Graphics cards, ram, hard drives, network cards etc.

Then you look further and see that it’s done with coffee machines, motors (of all sorts), and just about any other device you can find, make or name.

Wanting a fast/strong/powerful/quick X is a fairly common thing for many of us.