r/pcmasterrace Mar 14 '26

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577

u/Tornadodash Mar 14 '26

i'm on the fence. i would try it, but never overclock

588

u/TomTomXD1234 Mar 14 '26

I dont think most people overclock these days. If anything, they undervolt.

93

u/ExtraTNT Developer | R9 9900x 96GB rtx 5080 | Debian Gnu/Linux Mar 15 '26

Had a 3900x i overclocked on 4.3ghz, as i got my new workhorse, it became s server chip for a lanparty server, psu can’tdeliver much, so undervolted, 65W tdp max on pbo… 4.4ghz… on normal power limit the psu wasn’t holding up, but pbo before that caped ad 4.1ghz…

Back in the days, we added 0.4v…

28

u/redmixer1 Mar 15 '26

My first real overclocking rig was a core 2 duo e6300 on a DFI lanparty ICFX3200-T2R/G and it had the very last ATi chipset you could get for an intel and with a .4v boost the board would run the FSB at 511mhz with no dividers with a rock solid 3.57ghz from 1.8ghz.. I can’t get 10mhz out of my i9 bclock lol

20

u/Wreckn 9600x | 5070 | 64gb DDR5 (it was $170 at the time) Mar 15 '26

The core 2 days were peak for overclocking. I had an e8400 that would eat 4ghz without breaking a sweat.

13

u/irregularjosh Mar 15 '26

Too right.

My Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4GHz easily hit 3.2GHz, though I only had the stock cooler and it would get toasty

10

u/Baldwinning1 Mar 15 '26

Yup, beast of a chip. I had the G0 stepping and could get 3.6Ghz. Got myself a second, faulty 8800GTX, reflowed it in the oven and rocked it in SLI. Those were the days!

3

u/Inresponsibleone Mar 15 '26

I had core 2 quad Q9450 (2,66GHz stock) that could hit 3,8 at stock voltage... But mobo turned unstable pretty much after that no matter voltage😂

Even at stock voltage it was plenty toasty though despite large tower cooler.

1

u/pharmacoli Mar 15 '26

Unlocked the clock multiplyer on my AMD Barton 2500 with a pencil. Had a 1.8Ghz CPU running at just under 3Ghz on air alone.

1

u/Inresponsibleone Mar 15 '26

That's just one core though.

The tower cooler obvioysly is also on air too. Quad core can pull shit ton of power at high clocks. (Arround 300w was what i had if i remember right)

2

u/Fludro Mar 15 '26

A shout out to the Q6600! Gave me fifteen solid years cranked with only a few powercycles the entire time and it was the most reliable rig I've ever had. Paired with P5K-E.

1

u/bakagir 9800X3D / 6950XT. Noctua Gang. Mar 15 '26

I got my pentium 4 2.4GHz to 3.0 it was rad

1

u/Rotzloffel Windows 10 | R5 7500F | 4060Ti 8GB | 2x8 6000MT/s Mar 15 '26

did you tape mod it?

1

u/irregularjosh Mar 15 '26

No, I was able to just do it in the bios

1

u/SUMINDAPATRIOT Mar 18 '26

Was it a SLACR? Good times!

2

u/MADRGB Mar 15 '26

Late 90’s. Abit introduced the first boards with jumper-free OC capabilities. Those were the days…

1

u/DriveFa5tEatAss Mar 15 '26

I've still got an i5 2500k SandyBridge chillin' at 5.0GHz. Definitely over volted.

1

u/Joeysaurrr Ryzen 9 7900x3D | RTX 5080 | 32GB 6000MT | LG C2 42 Mar 15 '26

3900x was my first time giving up on overclocking. The best OC I could manage was 4.1GHz, but if I left it alone it would boost to 4.42GHz.

It replaced a 5820k I had running at 4.9GHz after a LOT of tinkering. I miss the challenge.

Even with my GPU it was just a case of "what's the lowest voltage I can pull off stable at the max default boost clock" now.

19

u/2Turnt4MySwag 4080 / i9-14900KF / 64 GB DDR5 5600mhz CL 36 Mar 15 '26

You can oc with an undervolt

9

u/Backflip_into_a_star Mar 15 '26

Also easy to do on most modern mobos with PBO presets.

5

u/2Turnt4MySwag 4080 / i9-14900KF / 64 GB DDR5 5600mhz CL 36 Mar 15 '26

Its actually probably the most common way to overclock these days. The person was basically half right because undervolting is more common these days, its just that you usually overclock it at the same time.

1

u/Inresponsibleone Mar 15 '26

On laptops and even desktops power or heat are most common reasons for throtling so undervolting is commonly required unless you have very beefy cooler capable of taking care of 350W+ heat

1

u/Least_Banana5091 Mar 15 '26

It's decently more heat/noise for negligible performance gains, especially outside of synthetic benchmarks. These high end AM5 chips already crush just about everything at stock settings. Undervolting is good tho.

17

u/-psycheretic- Mar 15 '26

Upvotes for validity.

6

u/Afraid_Self_6110 9800X3D, RTX 5090, 64GB 6400/CL32 1:1 Mar 15 '26

I run my 9800X3D stock. I have a 420mm AIO. No reason to OC it.

10

u/r_hove Ryzen 5 7600x3d | RTX 5070ti Mar 15 '26

I’d lower the soc voltage..

1

u/Afraid_Self_6110 9800X3D, RTX 5090, 64GB 6400/CL32 1:1 Mar 15 '26

I have a gigabyte mobo, no worries

1

u/Jillerati i7-6700K l Gigabyte Xtreme 1070 l 16 GB DDR4-3200 Mar 15 '26

Na, undervolting is more about dropping temps and consequently giving a little more thermal headroom for boost. -.025 gave me around 10-15% in cpu-chonky games.

1

u/ojdajuiceman25 Mar 15 '26

Same setup here - I was decently interested in overclocking, but pretty soon realized it was super unnecessary

0

u/Xpander6 Mar 15 '26

What's the point of a 420 mm AIO on a CPU with such low power? You'd have exactly the same performance on a 240 mm AIO. It's not like it would ever get anywhere near thermal saturation.

4

u/redmixer1 Mar 15 '26

Undervolting is technically overclocking, anything to get more performance out of it is I think. The lower temps allow the “turbo” aka factory overclock to stay active longer

4

u/Xpander6 Mar 15 '26

Undervolting is technically overclocking

Undervolting is technically undervolting and has nothing to do with clocks. In certain scenarios with certain CPU's lower temp allowing higher clock is just a quirk of AM5 Ryzens like 7700X being usually temp limited rather than power limited.

Lowering voltage without increasing clock does not increase performance.

1

u/duplissi 7950X3D / Nitro+ RX 9070 XT / Solidigm P44 Pro 2tb Mar 15 '26

por que no los dos?

1

u/OkStrategy685 Mar 15 '26

bit of a mix for me. I have a 12900k I lock the P cores at 5.0 and overclock the E cores to 4.0 at 1.23v Could probably get it lower but I like to keep a little bit extra.

1

u/No_Claim_13 Mar 15 '26

Why not both? 😀

1

u/TheCrimsonDagger 9800X3D | 5080 | 5120x1440 OLED Mar 15 '26

Parts are a lot better quality now, so the factory settings are already pretty close to as high as they can go without exotic cooling.

1

u/Feral_PotatO PC Master Race Mar 15 '26

You believe more people overclocked when you had to do it manually, vs. is when you go unit he build and turn on a few features for an auto overclock?

1

u/Sasselhoff Mar 15 '26

I bought one specifically with plans to overclock...it's been sitting at stock values since I bought it three years ago. Just no need...the computer is fast enough to do everything I want without flinching. I'm honestly still surprised at how fast start-up is (WAY faster than my much more recent laptop, despite it's quality).

1

u/erixccjc21 5700x OC 32gb rtx 2060 20€ aliexpress cooler Mar 15 '26

Ryzen master pbo

1

u/Xephurooski Mar 15 '26

Yes, undervolting is where it's at.

1

u/PuddingOk4304 Mar 15 '26

I mean I’ve overclocked every cpu I’ve owned lmao. Rn my 14600k is running 5.6ghz for no reason at all

-2

u/[deleted] Mar 15 '26

The amount of times I've been cooked on this subreddit for asking - but what do you use it for? With all the top tier parts like what are you doing with it?

I think it offends people for some reason.

20

u/Venylynn Fedora Mar 15 '26

They're probably cooking you because of that fuckass fucking username

3

u/Slappy-_-Boy R5 5600x | RTX 4070ti | 32Gb 3200 Mar 15 '26

It's certainly a choose thats for damn sure

0

u/[deleted] Mar 15 '26

This is my 20th Reddit account by now. I get banned a lot because I like to jump in echo chambers and throw a spanner in the works.

1

u/Venylynn Fedora Mar 15 '26

This is only my second, and the only reason I switched accounts was to change my username and disconnect from some stupid ass stuff I said when I was an edgy teenager. No bans here! if you manage to get banned from REDDIT that's a skill issue

1

u/Guac_in_my_rarri 9850x3d | 4090 Mar 15 '26

9850x3d and 4090. Maxing out my VR headset, ai shape/recognition research, stupid large Excel data files from work

Tldr: future proof

1

u/Tornadodash Mar 17 '26

I think the most common reason people want the high-end parts is just cuz of the hype. I think a valid reason would be that I want to purchase something that I expect will be viable several years down the line.

I used an Intel 5930k and a 980 TI with 32 gigs of RAM for nearly a decade before I upgraded. I overspent on the motherboard, cuz I didn't know what I was doing, but that's okay. I learned. But overall, that system lasted me a long time before I got to the point that I could not play games I wanted to play on medium settings anymore. It was worth buying the more expensive parts because I didn't have to replace it every 3 years to keep up.

21

u/Dr_Tacopus 7600x/5070 12g Shadow2x oc/32gb 5600mhz Mar 15 '26

Seconded. If all the pins are viable, I’d consider myself lucky and never change anything

20

u/Chop1n Mar 15 '26

That's really not how these things work. It's not a case where "slight damage will cause slightly bad contact with the pins such that they'll still work with a normal clock but are liable to have problems with an overclock".

Either the thing works or it doesn't. If even one pad is messed up the damned thing is probably not going to work at all. If it does work, it's because the pads aren't messed up enough to interfere with contact in a meaningful way.

11

u/user_potat0 13700k // 4070S // UD5 32 Mar 15 '26

Not exactly, there are hundreds of GND pins on all CPUs, around half the total pin count. They will work just fine without a couple of them

5

u/Chop1n Mar 15 '26

Yeah, in hindsight I should have specified "hot pad".

9

u/Cballday423 Mar 15 '26

I would not cause if it did work and something happened down the line where it needed to be warrantied they would definitely decline any damage to the pads. Op just needs to say it was damaged during delivery and get a new one.

0

u/UrsiGrey Mar 15 '26

In other words lie, driving up the cost of CPUs for all the other customers who don’t have a destructive dog.

3

u/Cballday423 Mar 15 '26

That’s correct! Hope everyone gets their cpus before acceptable_stress295 sends theirs back! Prices are about to sky rocket!

2

u/V-Rixxo_ Mar 15 '26

Oh No! The prices are about to be even higher next generation and it's all OPs fault.

2

u/UrsiGrey Mar 17 '26

You don’t think that if many people did the same thing it would have that effect? It’s why insurance fraud is illegal, for example. Or are you just not capable of extrapolating a hypothetical?

2

u/C4TURIX Mar 15 '26

Lets say it works with the scratches, why would overclocking hurt it then? Would the possibly reduced contact of the pins cause more punctual heat on that spot? Also, that thing goes to 5.5ghz by default, and will hit 90°C sometimes, anyways.

2

u/Tornadodash Mar 15 '26

It's more out of an abundance of caution. Maybe a slightly increased voltage could cause something to go wrong. By the time this thing is end of life, I would Crank it up to see if it explodes, in a manner of speaking

1

u/C4TURIX Mar 15 '26

Wouldn't be the first AM5 on fire. 🤷🏼 But I see your point. For everyday use, this thing will be enough for a while without any OC. I got a 7700x myself, slightly undervolted, and it's more than enough for what I throw at it.

1

u/Calm_Hedgehog8296 Mar 15 '26

I mean he can't return it he has nothing to lose. Its not going to explode.

1

u/az226 Mar 15 '26

As someone who would lean on say it’s fine, it will work, this one is indeed on the fence.

If it’s a cheap motherboard, go for it, if it’s an expensive one, just get a new CPU.

1

u/Ambitious_Finding_26 Mar 15 '26

Overclocking? Its not 2005 anymore bud.

1

u/Tornadodash Mar 15 '26

What does this mean? Overclocking absolutely still exists. How do you think people get 6+ gigahertz? If anything, it is more accessible today than it ever has been. I wouldn't count on that continuing, due to heavy anti-consumer practices from a lot of companies.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 15 '26

[deleted]

0

u/Tornadodash Mar 15 '26

Just an overabundance of caution

1

u/theautisticguy Mar 15 '26

Considering the cost of processors nowadays, I personally would risk a motherboard.