

Every processor is different, you can take 50 Intel Core i9-9900Ks, or AMD Ryzen 7 2700Xs, or Nvidia RTX 2080 Tis, and each and every chip will overclock differently, reach a different max clock speed and behave in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. On top of your thermal limit, there’s also the silicon lottery, and a silicon limit to consider.



A lot of the times they may very well just crash your entire rig. Once they hit that point, the processors will either shut down, or throttle back their frequency to reduce the thermal load on them, preventing damage done to the system. Most processors (both those found in CPUs and GPUs), have a TJMax, or max thermal limit of around 100 degrees Celsius, sometimes more, but it’s very rare. It’s also not just simply a case of adding more voltage and more frequency, as there are limits to what you can do, both with silicon and with the cooling. If you don’t have the cooling capacity to be able to do this, you’re likely going to run into trouble. In short: More volts, means more heat, means more noise. If it has to work harder, then your fans will likely work harder too to try and compensate. What are the results of overclocking?Īlong with additional performance, when overclocking and introducing that extra voltage you’re also introducing more heat into the system as well, meaning your cooling solution is going to have to work harder. The Ryzen Threadripper is one of the most powerful, commercially available CPUs. Core count, transistor size and architectural advancements all have a far greater weighting when it comes to that than frequency on its own. Now that’s not to say Hz is the only metric you should be looking at when it comes to performance. The higher the frequency the faster it’ll run. A very basic understanding of frequency, measured in Hz, is it's effectively the number of times per second the piece of hardware can complete a full cycle or instruction that your software sends it. Overclocking is the act of increasing the amount of voltage going into a component part, and then in turn increasing the frequency at which that part runs at. The big question is: is it worth it when it comes to gaming PCs? Well, let’s break it down shall we? What is overclocking? The first who believe it’s absolutely pointless, and achieves nothing, and the second who see it as the absolute be all, and end-all of performance increasing mini-hobbies, at least in our grand hobby of PC gaming that is. You get two types of people when it comes to talking about overclocking. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the notion is still there.
