Stop the Watercooling/Overclocking Madness

TL;DR = DO THE MATH:  Price out a overclockable ready system (eg. 7600K/Watercooler/Z270/GTX1060) with a non-overclockable system that uses the next higher tier of GPU (eg. 7600/B250/GTX1070) It’s cheaper and faster.

Besides, you are rolling the dice with overclocking; besides possibly burning up the CPU/RAM/Motherboard, moderate to high overclocking is not stable, or frying things with leaks but you need to overclock that much to get any difference.  CERTAINLY others may have been successful with overclocking their CPU a lot, but it may have come from a different batch than yours and they have completely different hardware. Overclocking may not like your motherboard, ram or GPU. Troubleshooting that is time consuming, annoying and expensive; do you want to be buying a different part to see if it makes your whole system more stable? Also every day here I deal with someone who has burned up some of their hardware overclocking and they “don’t know why” when clearly the **marketing told them** or noobs here said overclocking would be okay. I don’t care if your motherboard was “designed” for it. It’s a gamble and if it’s not stable and you have to resort to stock speeds, now you have a overpriced CPU fan/MB/RAM. You’re also now a PC builder, so you will be upgrading. What’s the market for a CPU that has been heavily overclocked it’s entire life? Would you buy one? No. Would you ethically sell one? Up to you. . . Sure the CPU can handle some overclocking, and it’s built in, let that do what it’s designed to do.

 

But, dollar for dollar, it’s better to just get a faster CPU/GPU with that extra fan money, which would be WAY faster than overclocking. THE FACTS:

 

First of all the latest intel CPU’s are designed to overclock without interference from you. Let it do it’s work. Nobody has crashed their system while intel was in charge of overclocking.

Why do you want to use watercooling/overclock?

I want to overclock because I want a faster system.

I want to overclock because I want faster gaming.

I want to water cooling because it’s Quieter.

Well, I just still want to do water cooling.

 

If overclocking doesn’t

1. Reduce Boot times

2. Reduce File Load/Save/Encoding times

3. Increase noticeable frame rates

They are useless.

 

I want to overclock because I want a faster system.

i5-4670K – $230, with $100 water cooling, overclocked:

vs

Stock i7-4790K – $300

Not Faster

Not Faster

Not Faster

See how Dollar per Dollar Overclocking is : Not Faster!

I want to overclock because I want faster gaming.

I want to water cooling because it’s Quieter.

Well, I just still want to do water cooling.

I want to overclock because I want faster gaming.

Let’s see:

 

 

This is an average of 1-5 FPS more. That’s not noticeable.

I want to overclock because I want a faster system.

I want to water cooling because it’s Quieter.

Well, I just still want to do water cooling.

I want to water cooling because I think it’s quieter.

Let’s look at REAL LIFE data.

Let’s get look at the popular Coolermaster Hydro H100/i.

So, air cooling is 1. Cheaper. 2. HALF the noise. 3. Cools about the same (less than 3°F).

Water cooling is 1. Over twice as loud. 2. More expensive. 3. Cools about the same.

Not to mention the setup is more extensive, more complicated, risk of frying electronics from leaks, dealing with water issues, sludge pump buildup, more complicated moving parts, and the vibration of the pump can be annoying.

I want to overclock because I want a faster system.

I want to overclock because I want faster gaming.

Well, I just still want to do water cooling.

 

Q. Well, I just still want to do water cooling.

But, I know it’s risky, loud, expensive and only fractionally slightly better, but I wanna!

I understand. Everyone does it at once. (I did too) Burn the money, do it once and get it over with.

I want to overclock because I want a faster system.

I want to overclock because I want faster gaming.

I want to water cooling because it’s Quieter.