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  • C.C. - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    First! Great Article Ian..I really wish Intel hadn't decided to stop the Mobo work around's allowing i3 overclocking..
  • ImSpartacus - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    Yeah, fantastic article. I loved how he ran benchmarks at various overclocks.
  • edlee - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    This was really a shame that this article was not testing a regular i3 with a normal tdp, it would have shown a definate overclock to 4.5ghz and beating stock i5 by a good margin.

    It would become the celeron 300a of this generation
  • ImSpartacus - Saturday, March 19, 2016 - link

    Yeah, is there a section that explains why a 6100 wasn't used?

    I admittedly still haven't read the whole article, I found the part that states that a 6100te is a very unusual oem-only part.
  • RobATiOyP - Saturday, March 19, 2016 - link

    Hardly the 300a was a guaranteed 50% oc affecting both cpu, FSB and memory on a socket giving a clean & supported widely deployed set of frequencies, without any drawbacks. It meant a relatively cheap Celeron could compete with top of the line PII's using slower cache memory on Slot riser cards.

    The skylake BCLK oc, seems to come withdrawbacks slow downs have shown up in some benchmarks, probably due to the complexity of multiple timing domains in modern chips.
  • cobrax5 - Monday, March 21, 2016 - link

    The awesome thing with the 300A was the 128KB of full speed cache. I beleive the PII's had double the cache but at half the speed. I loved the 300A - possibly my favorite processor of all time because of when I got it, etc. I had a friend who did the hack to go dual socket 300A's. I remember this whole problem of wanting to run 98SE, but only the NT kernel supported multiple CPU's/sockets/cores (all the same back then...memories).

    Anyone remember the Voodoo 1/2 add-in cards? Those things were pretty sweet for what they did for 3D games, despite the funny VGA passthru cable...
  • 0ldman79 - Monday, April 4, 2016 - link

    Voodoo 2 and the 300A. The good old days.

    I didn't get to play with the 300A, but I got the Celeron 500 and 533, they'd hit 700+ if done right. I got to play with dozens of them and find a good one. It was fun overclocking a Dell.
  • RobATiOyP - Sunday, March 20, 2016 - link

    The point is that CPUs get thermally limitted, increasing volts can increase Watts in a very small area. Therefore there's some sense in trying out a power efficient chip, which has headroom.

    What the benchmarks really seem to show, is to do well on multi-threaded you need.. 4+ cores. In single thread the cheap Pentium and this i3, do well against the more expensive stock chips.
  • Flunk - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Interesting article, although it is a little bit skewed to compare the stock performance of that i5 6600 vs the overclocked i3 without including overclocked numbers for the i5, which you could have gotten using the same motherboard you tested the i3 on.
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    That might be in a future piece. Depending on how open base clock overclocking is going to be, at this point I'm wondering if each Skylake CPU I get in should have the overclock treatment given how so few motherboards enable it.
  • nathanddrews - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Predicating the value of i3 overclocking as a whole on the 6100TE is absurd, don't you think? The 35% OC of the 6100TE is still slower than the base clock speed of the vanilla 6100 (3.7GHz), which when OCed over 4.2GHz offers a tremendous value. For the same price - why on earth would you buy the much slower 35W variant if your goal is overclocking?

    http://ark.intel.com/compare/90729,88181

    From the standpoint of motherboard/BIOS SKYOC availability alone I would agree that the case is now somewhat moot, but I think the case that has already been made months ago by DigitalFoundry and others is that the SKYOC i3 (normal i3 CPUs that you can buy) makes a very strong value. It's a shame that mobo vendors caved so quickly.
  • dualsmp - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    I suspect politics is a work here. Also, the conclusion would be more clear cut with the 6100 rather than a bit nebulous with the 6100TE.

    Remember how fast Intel shutdown overclocking after the Clarkdale i3? When the Clarkdale i3 was overclocked it was nipping at the heels of Intel's more expensive parts at the time. The Clarkdale i3 offered too much value for the money when overclocked, so Intel had to shut it down.
  • ImSpartacus - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    You're probably right about the politics. It's a shame, but Anandtech is probably under Intel's finger.
  • alistair.brogan - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Is there hope for an AMD Zen dual core that will overclock? That's all I'd recommend for people :)
  • ImSpartacus - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    If zen is only 40% better ipc than excavator, then it won't be leading Intel and amd will still need high clocks compete. So I would bet that the stock zen parts might be using up a fair bit of that overclocking headroom.
  • alistair.brogan - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    I think a properly overclockable i3 would hit 4.5ghz, just like an i5 can, so imagine the results in that case. It wouldn't "maybe" be worth it, it would absolutely by awesome. Which is why Intel doesn't allow it..... don't want people buying 4.5ghz i3's and saying good bye to the expensive i5s
  • dragosmp - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Thanks for the review, it's a good reference point.

    I thought at some point the lowest end Xeon v5 (4C/8T) was quite a bit cheaper than the 6700K and much more available. If that could be OCed, and I think some motherboards like Gigabyte's Cxxx say they could, that would have been the fastest CPU while keeping some money in the pocket.

    Agreed with getting older and putting a higher value on our time, but if my kid decides to leave me alone for a while I still like to tinker with OCing
  • Samus - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    It's true Xeon's are usually priced between the i-series and i-series k equivalents (there are i5 and i7 based Xeon's) so it would be cheaper than a "k" part while giving you ECC and full vPro support, not to mention Xeon's appear to have soldered heatspreaders when starting with Ivy Bridge, everything but Xeon's were shipped with pretty subpar TIM/paste. That only slightly improved with Devils Canyon...they still weren't fused lid-to-die like a Xeon.

    There are a few theories why Intel uses solder on Xeon CPU's. One is obviously temperature and 24/7 consistency. The most plausible reason, though, is the weight and pressure of server cooling solutions (compared to most OEM PC coolers and water blocks. I weighed a tiny 1U Xeon cooler once. This thing was like 20mm tall, and it still weighed 870 grams. That's 2 lbs! Pure block of copper fins. Tightened down to 25Nm and exposed to the pressure, vibration and temperatures of a 1U environment for years, you can take a guess why Intel makes the Xeon lids more durable.
  • extide - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Please do that future piece, anyone who is seriously considering doing this will definitely not be sing the T or TE series chips, and as you mentioned you can't even really get them in the retail market. I would really like to see what a 4.4-4.6Ghz i3 can do.
  • LostWander - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    The idea is to show how close to i5 performance you can get while paying the price of an i3. Although it would be interesting to see how well the i5 overclocks too so we can see how close to K performance we can get for a non-k price.
  • ViperV990 - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    The i5-6400 @ $180 seems to be a much better part to OC.
  • nightbringer57 - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Heh, when some of the younger ones today speak about overclocking, I like to remember them of how much more financially interesting overclocking used to be. It's like everyone forget how overclocking worked a few years ago. I still remember my cheap student gaming PC with a Pentium E2180 that went from 2GHz to 3GHz with a standard tower rad and only a slight voltage boost. Then you could have almost all of the performance of the 300€ CPUs (except a good bit of the cache) for 60€ or so. Multiplier overclocking is easier, yes, and it's good to reach insane peak frequencies - but this market of the "buy low, push high" overclocking has faded out (courtesy, of course, of the segmentation by core numbers as well)
  • BrokenCrayons - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Oh yeah, well I overclocked when there were still turbo buttons on the fronts of AT cases! So nyah nyah!

    Sarcasm aside though, drawing a line in the sand to mark when overclocking was "good" or "worthwhile" and when it stopped being fun or have any sort of point would result in an awful lot of people drawing an awful lot of lines all over the place. For instance, the last processor I bothered with overclocking was a 2GHz Pentium 4 derived Celeron. Pushing the FSB from 100 to 150MHz on an Intel boxed cooler with a little bit of extra voltage netted a 3GHz chip...which rapidly became highly unstable over the course of a few months. After that and numerous PIIs, PIIIs, the infamous Celeron 300A and whatnot, I got bored with it and my priorities shifted. I would have overclocked my VIC-20 and Trash 80 if I'd known more about computers because I couldn't resist tinkering. I think if one were to ask other people, they'd find different points in time and different processor technologies so it's probably unfair to people who are simply by nature of the date of their birth, unable to discuss overclocking in terms you're more comfortable with.
  • nightbringer57 - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Yes, but still. There had been a more or less constant trend of tinkering around with low-end CPUs to get quasi-high-end performance out of them for quite a long time. I quote my old E2180, but over the "modern" history of computers (that is, in the current context, IBM PC and their heir), there had always been such shenanigans available to the tinkerers. If you go further in time, the trend fades as the modern concept of CPU "range" fades out and it came more down to boosting your X - generation CPU to still have a bit more oomph after most of the software environment of you given platform had moved to a new generation.
    And not only Intel processors, but AMD processors as well, with the pencil unlockable Durons and whatnot.

    As this article states, this kind of overclocking has more or less died in recent years, partly due to technical issues (as systems get more and more complex and integrated, it becomes riskier), partly due to the current state of the market, partly due to marketing practices.

    It's not about discussing overclocking in terms I personally am comfortable with or whatnot. It's just about being realistic. I hope that AMD can come back with Zen and bring a bit more freshness into the low-end overclocking market.
  • Spoelie - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    Still had a lot of fun in the period between 2000-2010 with the Athlons, always buying the lowest end SKU of the performance line, and ocing between 20-40% to reach the same performance of the highest end SKU in the line.

    E.g.
    On an nForce2 board IIRC
    * Athlon XP 1800+ (Socket A Thoroughbred 256KB cache) 1533mhz OC to ~2ghz
    * Athlon XP 2500+ (Socket A Barton 512KB cache) FSB166 to FSB200 = OC to "3200+"

    Had a Athlon 64 2800+ on a Socket 754 for a very short time, don't remember what I did to it.

    Then a "DFI LanParty UT NF4 Ultra-D" (Socket 939 w/ nForce4 & 2*512MB Winbond BH-5 PC3200 @ 250mhz 2-2-2), cream of the crop at the time.
    * Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice) OC 1800 to 2250 (250bus)
    * Opteron 165 (Toledo) OC 1800 to 2475 (274bus)

    I loved those days
  • Murloc - Sunday, March 20, 2016 - link

    yeah I remember a 45nm core 2 duo I had, with the boxed stock cooler I was able to lower the voltage quite a bit and daily OC it at 4GHz at the same time.
    It was a lucky piece compared to others.
  • cobrax5 - Monday, March 21, 2016 - link

    I'm thinking about replacing my 45nm i7-930 @ 3.8ghz with a hex-core, 32nm Xeon and OC that to > 3.6ghz. You can get them for like under $200, and I'll keep my (admittedly aging) X58 platform.
  • benedict - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Single-threaded benchmarks show this processor to be much better than what it'd be in real life. I don't know if there are people who only run a single program at a time on their PCs. Having more cores is much more valuable than most benchmarks will show.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    I can run 7 programs at once, but if one is very demanding and is single threaded, then single threaded performance is still quite relevant. Multiple programs/=/not needing single threaded performance. Thinking that single threaded performance is not important got AMD the FX series, and subsequently a large portion of their users jumping to intel.
  • calculagator - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Everyone is different, but single threaded benchmarks give a much better picture of performance for "normal" users than multithreaded in my experience. Even if they have lots of programs running, most users are only using one program at a time. All of those open documents and web tabs use very little CPU power while they just sit there. I have about 100 active processes right now, but my CPU is idling at about 3% usage.
    Even a basic dual-core CPU can handle most users' multitasking. The most common exceptions are gaming and video editing, but most users are not doing those things most of the time. Consider how people use laptops so often: their CPUs have such high single-threaded/burst performance that they hardly notice how much less powerful they are than much more powerful desktop CPUs.
  • RobATiOyP - Sunday, March 20, 2016 - link

    Yep.. and that's why desktop CPUs are 2 or 4 core; programs tend not to scale linearly to CPUs thanks to lock contention and Amdahl's law.
    When a program waits for net or disk i/o or user input, it rests in an OS wait queue, woken up when the event has completed.
  • rscoot - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    The heyday of overclocking for me was getting 50% OCs with a celeron 300A in a 440BX mobo, through mobile AMD XPs that you could push from 1.5GHz to 2.7 and beyond if you had some BH-5 and a DFI Lanparty mobo to Athlon 64s that would go from 1.8GHz to 2.7Ghz with the same RAM.
  • BrokenCrayons - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    The 300A was a good time for overclocking. I never had much luck in the chip lottery with AMD CPUs. My T-birds and T-breds must have been duds, but there was a 350MHz K6-2 that I squeezed pretty hard using a peltier cooler I snagged from a computer show. Doing nothing to mitigate condensation wasn't a bright idea though. My favorite overclocked chip was a 100MHz Pentium which was getting long in tooth by the 1998. A few minutes messing with DIP switches on the motherboard got it up to 133MHz with no consideration to cooling or voltage. The heatsink was glued on by the OEM and the chip (which still exists to this day in a cardboard box) was utterly apathetic to the change.
  • bill.rookard - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    It is really a shame that you pretty much do have to go back in time to get overclockable parts, but careful shopping will get you quite a lot for a little. My current build which I just put together a few weeks ago was a Xeon X3470 ($70) with an Asus P7F7-E WS motherboard. BCLK overclocking went from 2.9ghz to 4.2ghz.
  • pizzahut22 - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    This article is so silly. Why did you overclock a i3 6100TE? You basically took it and made it into a standard i3 6100... Not to mention its an OEM part that nobody will be using for this.

    This article blows my mind. Just overclock a standard i3 6100 and give us the numbers compared to stock i5 and i7s, and overclocked i5 and i7s. Also give us some graphs about price/performance and talk about that. This article is well below typical Anandtech standards.
  • OrphanageExplosion - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Eurogamer has all the Core i3 6100 overclocking data you need plus tons of FCAT: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2...

    In CPU-limited scenarios, an overclocked i3 with fast memory dukes it out with a Core i5 6500 with slower memory when both are paired with a Titan X (which means you're CPU-bound more of the time). I would imagine that the gap narrows if you're running something like a GTX 970.

    The real question I want answered is this: if I apply a BIOS update that locks out Skylake non-K OC, do I get it back by reverting to an older BIOS?
  • dualsmp - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    I wouldn't update if you have a working overclock. I've seen a few posts about people updating their board, then reverting back to the old BIOS and it does NOT overclock anymore. It sets some kind of kill bit and overclocking does not return.
  • OrphanageExplosion - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    Thanks!
  • silverblue - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    I'd be somewhat annoyed if I'd written a 15,000 word article only to have it shot down by people who don't see my point of view, but maybe I'm not getting it.
  • Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    This has got to be some kind of joke. There is already an i3-6320 which runs at 3.9GHz. What is this review supposed to be telling us? Seems completely pointless. And then they throw in a 4.7GHz G3258 just to further highlight the pointlessness. Where is the 4.7GHz i3?
  • Taristin - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Total War: Atilla shows the incorrect graph for performance with a GTX card. It shows the Alien Isolation score (Which is... significantly different!)
  • yannigr2 - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Did I saw an Athlon 845 somewhere in there? Is a review incoming?
  • Bad Bimr - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    I miss the days of the cheap CPU with BIG TIME OC potential. My first foray in OCing was with the legendary Celeron 300A. That got me hooked. Next was the P3 600 and next came the P4 2.8 (Northwood) followed by the i7-920. Last year I bought a i7-4790k only to sell it when I came upon a thread on X-58 Xeon overclocking. Currently rocking a very conservative Xeon x5675 @ 4.15 Ghz (25x166) on stock voltage on air on all 6 cores with HT on. I have had it stable to 4.4 GHz but feel better with the lower voltage, plenty fast enough. Total cost for the x5675, $76 on eBay! I love cheap CPU overclocking.
  • OrphanageExplosion - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    This is a remarkable article. Anandtech has overclocked a *really slow* Core i3 processor so that it's not as fast as the slowest consumer-level i3 and written a *15-page* piece on it?!

    Why didn't you just buy the Core i3 6100?

    The data elsewhere demonstrates why Intel never released a K i3 - it gives quad-like performance for gaming at 4.4GHz, where the i5 is king. The value argument is diluted a bit by the fact you will need a third party cooler though, while the i5 6500 is pretty awesome just with a stock HSF and some fast DDR4.

    I really, really hope that AMD targets this sector aggressively with Zen - it could be a game-changer.
  • ReverendDC - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    The perfect explanation why AMD is needed in the CPU space as well. No competition = restrictions to force more purchases from a single vendor.
  • Achaios - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    I was thinking, looking at the gaming benchmarks, that I am going to be stuck with the 4770k for maaaaaaannnnyyyy years to come.
  • JoeyJoJo123 - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    I honestly think asking why an i3 K-series processor doesn't exist is an awful question.

    I think the real question here that everyone isn't asking is:
    "Why is Intel even selling non-K processors in anything but business grade (Xeon) CPUs?"

    Doing a 15 page investigation where you compare an awful starting point locked i3 sample (one that isn't even relevant to consumers), examining its overclocked results, and the results of a locked i5 sample, then concluding that yes, the lower grade processor indeed does have worse performance than an i5, that might be why they don't have a K-series i3, is both completely obvious yet misses the point entirely.

    Overclocking is a choice for the consumer. Whether or not the i3 part fully closes the gap with an i5 part is irrelevant, and if it doesn't close the gap, that's not a valid reason to then conclude that's why they don't sell K-series i3's. Overclocking gets me more performance than stock, and regardless of how big or small the overclock is, it should be up to the user to choose whether to overclock, not up to the manufacturer to dictate whether you can attempt to overclock at all (with non-K chips.)

    I still can't understand why people are trying to find logic in strategic marketing placement of Intel chips (ie: rationalizing it for Intel, exactly what their marketing department wants) when you should be asking "Why are you selling me a locked down chip? I should be free to run this at whatever level of performance I can muster, as after I purchase this product, it is wholly mine to use as I please"
  • RobATiOyP - Sunday, March 20, 2016 - link

    From the OEM & Intel's point of view, having ppl add volts & frequency to their complicated processors, may well lead to unstable chips or non-functioning, which may be (attempted) to be returned under warranty. If you buy a 3GHz locked CPU they're not fleecing you by not letting it be run faster, like options you pay more for.

    What is more annoying to me, is how there are various instruction options, like encryption & virtualisation which they turn on/off for market segmentation.
  • zodiacfml - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    Awesome. More care and effort was given here than I expected.
    Simply, Intel refuses to. Limiting higher frequencies to i5 and i7. The market Intel is limiting is gaming market. They might open it if AMD, miraculously, becomes competitive again.
  • TheHolyLancer - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    honestly i think the author missed the fact that intel( and amd to a point ) prices their stuff no-linearly

    to jump from a pentium to i3 may only be 50 but to jump from i5 to i7k or the extreme (well soon? for the 2011 revamp?) costs a lot more

    i remember the i7 920 too and with an oc i had i7 965 extreme levels of performance for way way cheaper
  • Tunrip - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    I began reading Anandtech long before I actually had a PC, let alone began overclocking.
    What was that Celeron everyone raved about back in the day? Celeron 200A or something?

    I remember Anand used to make reference to it. These overclockable i3s remind me of that. A budget chip that could blow away the higher-performing (and costing) chips of the day when overclocked.

    Simpler times... :)
  • ses1984 - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    So Why Do We Not See an Overclockable i3 CPU? No competition from AMD.
  • Macpoedel - Saturday, March 19, 2016 - link

    Zo SuperMicro seeded you a slow Core i3 that you only got as vast as a regular Core i3. Basically what you showed Here is that a regular Core i3 6100 isn't !much slower than a regular Core i5 6500 but it is over $50 cheaper. Could it have hurt to mention that a Core IE 6100 runs at 3,7GHz?

    Couldn't you just get the Core i3 6100 yourself or is Anandtech not allowed to buy hardware? I get that you can't just go out and buy a Core i7 5960x or a GTX Titan X, but the company couldn't pay a $100 CPU? Funds can't be that tight. The only conclusion I can make is that you have some deal to only use seeded parts.

    Honestly what is the point of this 15 page article if you don't get the relevant parts? Are you yourself satisfied about these results? I think you've done a lot of work completely in vain. It's good that you try to be a little more than just another promotion channel for Intel/SuperMicro/etc but you should have been a little more critical to yourself when reviewing the results and considering the parts you're using.
  • Macpoedel - Saturday, March 19, 2016 - link

    Oops some words got autocorrected to Dutch in the first paragraph, but I guess it's clear what I'm saying, can't edit apparently.
  • stardude82 - Saturday, March 19, 2016 - link

    I don't see the value here when you are spending such a premium for a budget board. Just looking at Newegg, there is only a $10 savings going from an i3-6100 with this board to an i5-6500 with a H110 board.
  • lagittaja - Monday, March 21, 2016 - link

    What a pointless article. A 15 page long article which is completely pointless.
    Are you yourself satisfied with your article Ian?

    What did this tell us consumers?
    That if you take an unobtanium slow arse i3 and OC it, it performs about the same as the regular i3's which are widely available?
    Great scott! I did not expect that! Mind blown!

    Now run along to the store and grab a 6100/6300/6320 and do proper testing. We want to see that 4.5-5Ghz i3 go head to head against the OC'd i5..
  • LuxZg - Monday, March 21, 2016 - link

    I'd like to say that part about BIOS obviously isn't true, as people have tried and succeeded to revert back to older versions. Example:

    "Assuming you can get your hands on the OC BIOS it is possible to flash back to the previous version to regain the base clock overclocking ability. Again the microcode isn’t written to the CPU and is kept at the BIOS level so rolling back isn’t a problem.
    To confirm this, I updated my Z170 Extreme7+ motherboard to version 2.60 and sure enough the overclock no longer worked. After rolling back to version 2.16 the ability to overclock my non-K processors returned."

    source: http://www.hardwareunboxed.com/current-state-of-in...
  • StrangerGuy - Monday, March 21, 2016 - link

    Free lunch is: Abit BH6 + 300A, nForce 2 + unlocked Athlon XP, P35 + <$200 Conroe

    Not free lunch: Anything today thanks to incredibly restrictive CPU/chipsets lockdowns. With my 4790K already stock at 4.2GHz I'm not going to bother with OC. I'm not even going to mention the absurdity of pairing $100+ mobo just to hack-OC a $100 already at 3.7GHz CPU that would probably get locked down by Intel with a stealth microcode update.
  • Rob27shred - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 - link

    Great read! Definitely gives a very clear explanation of why Intel has denied us a K SKUed i3. I was very excited when I first heard of being able to OC non K SKUed Skylake chips. I have an extra GB Z170XP-SLI mobo & was planning on getting an i3 6XXX to have a little fun with. Now I have to look into it further as I don't want to buy an i3 & not be able to OC it.

    It's a shame that Intel pulled the rug out from under this so quickly but I from a business point of view you really can't blame them. I got hopes that other ways around Intel's micro code update will be seen though. I heard ASrock released a mobo aimed squarely at getting around the new restrictions.
  • yhselp - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 - link

    Sheeeit! That's the best damn AnandTech article in a long, long time. God bless you, Ian! Fantastic. Quintessential AnandTech! I'm thirsty for more.

    Maybe a super in-depth article on the effects of faster RAM on modern games? DDR4@3200 seems essential for a new build nowadays, and a DDR3@2133/2400 upgrade could potentially be a great upgrade for gamers stuck on 1333/1600. 16GB a must for Windows 10 gaming? Maybe an article on GPU overclocking, AMD GPUs driver overhead, achieving minimum frame-rates, etc.
  • Y23KC - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link

    Ah, the fun of overclocking. I used to overclock starting with an AMD Duron 800mhz to 1ghz. Stayed with multiple AMD processors (Thunderbird 1ghz to 1.4ghz, TBird 1.4 to 1.8, 1900+ XP to a real 1.9, etc.) Tried a few coppermine pentiums, but was disappointed. Then I went to the P4 Northwood processors. Favorite of those was a 2.53ghz to 3.06ghz overclock. Also had the 2ghz Celron that was a great overclocker to encode videos. Didn't move past them for a while since AGP switched to PCIE graphics card and ddr2 ram with the Core2Duo. Finally moved to Core2Quad 9400 and it was a dud overclocker. Got rid of it and moved to Mac computers. Kept a few Windows laptops and a HTPC but just recently went back to overclocking with a 4770k. It was also a dud overclocker. Recently I got a 5820k and overclocked to 4.5ghz. Been enjoying the tinkering but honestly beyond benchmarks and video encoding, I can't tell the difference between it and an i3-6100 that I currently use in my HTPC. I also like to tinker with the Hackintosh stuff these days, but Apple keeps screwing around with the imessage protocol that doesn't make it as fun anymore to me
  • Bulat Ziganshin - Saturday, May 7, 2016 - link

    i wonder who can buy your argument about "half-way to i5". 65W parts like the http://ark.intel.com/products/90731/Intel-Core-i3-... has the same perfromance level out of box

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