Overclocking?

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

Good day,

One thing that I’ve always wondered about trying but never have is overclocking. I was thinking of trying it with a few components in this desktop PC.

I have no need to overclock and if I do overclock I want to do one “step” up, or whatever the smallest version of overclocking is. Me gaining any speed increase in any area at all would be a complete and unqualified success in my eyes.

I have six case fans in a professionally-built mid-size case, a 650 watt power supply, and no dedicated liquid cooling or similar. I don’t have any intention of adding liquid cooling in the foreseeable future, but adding better cooling is another little hobby project I may get into at a later time.

The current bottleneck in this PC is the RAM. I skimped on RAM because of the price. If I decide to try overclocking, it will be after I swap out the RAM for higher-speed/higher-quality RAM. Probably next month.

I’ve done some reading about the overall concepts and the pros and cons. Not overclocking the system means that I won’t get the experience and fun of doing it, and I’m just leaving money on the table if the system is capable of doing x+1 speed without any problems but I only have it doing x speed. But again, I’m not willing to sacrifice very much, if any, lifespan or overall system stability.

Basic layout:

Ryzen 7 2700
Mid tower, 6 fans, 650w power supply
Asus ASROCK B450 Pro4
GeForce RTX 2060, 6GB

I’m not afraid of BIOS and I could use a recommendation for low/no-cost stress test software. Does anyone have some favorite links about how to dive deeper into this? Experience? Thoughts?

2

overclocking ram is much more unstable than cpu, and you need a good mobo and really good ram to not crash all the time.

i cant even put an pair of 4gb and pair of 8gb in mine without suffering random restarts. and i have an asus z77.

and nickpicky, but asus and asrock are two different brands.

3

The nano-second level timing of a modern computer is much less tolerant of such things than equipment was just a few years ago. If you need “a faster computer,” I cordially recommend that you buy a new unit which was properly engineered for the purpose. (You can, of course, continue to use both units, the latter as a “slave.”)

4

Soooo… uhm… what do you have for RAM?

5

I could do that - buy a scrap PC and just practice on that like any other sandbox - only this time it’s hardware.

Like I mentioned, I don’t need a faster computer - I would be only doing this as a hobby and so that I can say that I’ve done it and know how to do it.

6

I’m embarrassed to say. :slight_smile:

But, if you guessed 2666mhz RAM, you’d be right.

Like I mentioned… it’s the first thing on my list to upgrade.

7

Damned computer manufacturers and their damned same first letters. :slight_smile: