Excellent Thread Fu!!!!
+1 front page.
Can't disagree with anyone here on any of their ideas on OCing. Benching is so much fun, I wish I had more time for it. A lot of the guys here, just make time for it. Those are the men of the group, the ones in charge of their own life LOL.
OCM is awesome, and took to benching like a flea to a dog, sucking the blood out of it and jumping to the next dog. Went from novice to experienced SOOO fast.
Benching is for fun for sport and little e-peen. I don't have a ton of submissions, as I am always trying to get the Hardware up to do something great and end up having to sell shit off. ARGH.
Need to learn to set my sights a little lower. With Sandy Bridge I think I can do that.
But the underlying question is "Why Do I overclock?"
1) Because I have to. Not as cool as it sounds. I am a multiPC kind of guy and just can't afford to have the best stuff laying around. OCed my Ath 240 x2 to 3.5GHz (on less than VID) as my main system to make black ops play smoothly
2) Overclocking is also about learning the architecture. Overclockers are some of the greatest sources of information available for learning new architectures. Voltage adjustments etc, shows you where a portion of the device might fail early or be capable of much more than it is at stock. Research is key.
3) I can so I do. Generally my latest and greatest HW acquisitions do not become 24/7 PCs until I have something better to bench. When they do become desktop units, overclocking generally becomes about tweaking a system for best performance. Usually I undervolt and still push it
Benching is addictive. I do not compete at the high end, but enjoy striving to beat whoever is above me on the first bench. Or knowing the arch like I do, and how to tweak, maybe a few guys
Guys like Allen and them strive to make me make sure I do my best when I submit, Kal makes sure to apply the urging when he is online
I would like to thank everybody at OCA though. I was on a benching team before and it was not fun at all. OCA made benching fun and the community developed here is AWESOME!