OVERCLOCKING IN 2024 - HAS THE END ARRIVED FOR HIGH VOLTAGE?

Zak Storey takes a look at whether overclocking is really worth it anymore

- Zak Storey

THERE’S SOMETHING inherently human about pushing technology to its limits. Companies do this all the time: building, developing, iterating on designs, new hardware, trying to eek out every last fleck of performance to beat the competition. The same can be said for amateur enthusiasts. There are very few people that don’t try to optimize how they work, their PC, or the hardware inside it.

Overclocking, by its very nature, speaks to that. In essence, it’s a love language for your PC. In the same way that you can get attached to a car, tool, or fishing rod, you can also become attached to a processor. It’s a bit of a bizarre quirk of humanity, this attachment to objects, as if they have personality; a soul.

The thing is, some processors actually do, to a lesser extent. The silicon lottery gifts them with differences. Some are better than others; some worse; some perform in a particular manner if you do one little tweak, and some score higher in one test than an identical CPU at the same spec. Apply enough voltage, adjust the multipliers, increase those clock speeds, and you could draw out more performance for free—at least that’s how it used to be. So what’s changed? Has the golden era come to an end? In a world of high competition and with the likes of Arm breathing down Intel and AMD’s necks, has that at-home pastime retired to the humble shores of PC history? Let’s take a look.

OVERCLOCKING’S HUMBLE ORIGINS

It might come as a surprise, but overclocking has been around for an incredibly long time. In fact, theoretically speaking, you could very much argue that the act of tweaking clock speeds actually originates with the OG manufacturers of those CPUs as they dive into trying to find exactly how far they can push those clock-speeds while keeping the chips themselves stable.