PPBM5 How many are really overclocking these days?

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[John Rowe] “Or is it just too dangerous with machines that are constantly needed for production?”

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I would personally find it too dangerous/unstable for a production-level machine. With CS5, big improvement comes from the use of a Cuda enabled card. The bottleneck at that point becomes rendering out any codec beyond h.264 (which is also Cuda enabled).

Depends on your current computer system and workflow. I would rather spend an extra $1,200 on two $600 computers and use them as frame serving nodes with After Effects (I finish and color conform all my production level work in AE) on top of my $1,000 base system, than have one single super beefy system for $2,200+. Granted my workstation is tuned for 1080 and 2k footage; if I did step up to editing 4k I may see some performance degradation that would force me to upgrade.

I can’t see overclocking shaving more than 10% off of rendering time, and that’s really generous. Plus you’re running it at 100% capacity which could cause heat and stability issues. If you have to, I’d suggest just upgrading.

[Jan Janowski]

I do not overclock CPU’s or Display cards.
I don’t believe the benefits outweigh the potential problems….

Looking for 1939 Indian Motocycle

[Jay Turberville]

If you are building your own box, then sure, why not include a motherboard that is overclocking friendly. Also, do a bit of online research and find out what to expect from your CPU of choice. Pick out the CPU that will work for you without overclocking first. And if it turns out to be an OK overclocker, then that’s just a nice bonus.

Overclocking these days is much easier than it was in the past. Heck, ASUS includes an autotune utility that tries to find a good setting for you that runs from windows. You don’t even have to mess with the BIOS. Just run the utility and sit back and wait. The main thing is to not get carried away with it. Consider a 10-15% boost as a reasonable goal. Avoid going for results like a 25% or more overclock. Don’t get a fancy and expensive water cooling system. Just get a big standard CPU cooler. You don’t want the overclock to be much of a side project. You don’t want to spend hardly any extra money to support it. The risk to hardware and so forth is virtually nonexistent these days. I think most CPUs have built-in protection from thermal overheating – which really isn’t much of a problem if you put a good cooling fan on and are conservative in your overclock.

Will your system become unstable? Probably not if you are conservative in the overclock. You can download some programs that will really stress the overclocked CPU. If the system passes these tests you are almost surely going to be fine.

Now, is it worth it? Sure. Why not? The overclocked system will either be stable or it won’t be. If it isn’t, set it back and don’t worry about it. If it is stable, what’s not to like about 10-15% more processing power? My 3.0Ghz system is humming along at about 3.5Ghz. It is more stable than our Avid MC system. We thought it was unstable and causing errors, but that turned out to be CS4 bugs. That’s probably the biggest risk of overclocking. You might be inclined to erroneously blame a problem or instability on the overclock.

Of course, enabling CUDA processing is more important than any overclock. But CUDA does not benefit everthing. The CPU is still doing a lot of heavy lifting. So even with CUDA, overclocking can be a nice bonus. BTW, you can also overclock you CUDA cores on many graphics cards.

What does 10-15% get you? Well nothing earthshaking. But perhaps a timeline that was marginal in playback sans previewswill not play back smoothly. In other words, the system just runs a little bit smoother/faster. It is no replacement for simply adding more CPU cores and/or more RAM. It is something to consider doing in addition to doing those things. No magic. Just a little faster.