confused nub.....

[Nalcyon]

I am a little confused. It was my understanding that most of today's games don't use 100% of the cpu power but can eat up graphics cards so it seems that the clocks of your gpus are the most important. However I have read many people's comments that o'cing the cpu will give you the biggest noticeable gains for gaming. I am a little confused. I am all for overclocking for the fun of it but does it really boost gaming if you are already >3ghz? Does a game use all that processing power? I overclocked my gtx 295 as high as I could go stable and got very noticeable gains.

 

So does Overclocking the cpu really help gaming or is it just for fun/intensive programs/benchmarking? (of course this is all assuming you are using the current technology and not an older cpu that needs o'cing just to stay up.)

Edited March 24, 2009 by Nalcyon

[IVIYTH0S]

I am a little confused. It was my understanding that most of today's games don't use 100% of the cpu power but can eat up graphics cards so it seems that the clocks of your gpus are the most important. However I have read many people's comments that o'cing the cpu will give you the biggest noticeable gains for gaming. I am a little confused. I am all for overclocking for the fun of it but does it really boost gaming if you are already >3ghz? Does a game use all that processing power? I overclocked my gtx 295 as high as I could go stable and got very noticeable gains.

 

So does Overclocking the cpu really help gaming or is it just for fun/intensive programs/benchmarking? (of course this is all assuming you are using the current technology and not an older cpu that needs o'cing just to stay up.)

with a high end card like that I'm almost positive that you will see more performance the higher you clock your CPU, CPU OC's will help any card though. I remember I could practically max Crysis when it was pretty new with my 8800gtx and overclocked memory/processor.

[Verran]

It depends on your system. As always, there's no one right answer. If you have a big video card and a junk cpu, then the cpu is the bottleneck and therefore you'll gain more from making it faster. In that same case, since the cpu is the bottleneck, upping the video card speeds may make a very small difference. On a similar system with a better cpu, those same video card changes may have a much bigger effect.

 

As for current games not using 100% CPU speed, that's really not the case. You may have misinterpreted someone who was saying that some games don't use all the CORES of a CPU, though. There's a big difference in those two statements. Just because a game doesn't use all four cores in a quad doesn't mean it won't benefit from a healthy CPU OC. In fact, usually it means it will.