Overclocking a CPU and its Advantages

Hello again.

It’s been a little while since my last visit;  School, life, and especially StarCraft 2 has been keeping me very busy. No big computer projects recently, but I did want to share some of my overclocking experience with my gaming computer setup.

I attached an image of a spreadsheet that I created below (Click to enlarge!).  I made it an image because it was the simplest way that I could think of of sharing a Excel spreadsheet on a blog; I hope the quality is okay.  The sheet shows a frames per second (FPS) testing and comparison with two different processors at multiple clock settings with everything else the same*.  I didn’t design the benchmarking to be perfect, but instead just to give a quick feel of performance gain.  Each row in the sheet is a individual 5 minute test of the first 5 minutes in a StarCraft 2 match.  I did the best I could to keep all the variables the same. In each of the boxes in the middle, you will find averages for each processor and clock frequency.  On the far right, you will see percentages of the performance gain (or loss in some cases) compared to each of the previous tests.

*The last test with the Q9550 has faster memory installed but less of it.  I went from 8GB of DDR2-800 to 4GB of DDR2-1066.  The last test the memory was running at a frequency of 942 Mhz.  All previous tests the RAM was at or below 822 Mhz since the RAM speed depends on the varying front side bus speed (FSB).  The RAM upgrade was done because it was bottlenecking the overclock potential.

It is important to note that when the FSB is overclocked the whole system  runs quicker.  This is shown when I upgraded from an overclocked Q8200 to a stock Q9550.  There is actually a performance decrease.  For you other overclockers out there, I kept the multipliers at their max and increased the FSB to overclock. 

Two processors were tested: Intel Q8200 at 2.3 Ghz (stock) and 2.8 Ghz. Intel Q9550 at 2.83 Ghz (stock), 3.5 Ghz, and 4 Ghz.  All other hardware was kept the same except the RAM mentioned above.

Test: Frames per second from the first 5 minutes of a Starcraft 2 multiplayer match.

Results:  There was about a 30% gain from 2.3 to 2.8 on the Q8200.  There was about a 60% gain from 2.83 to 4 Ghz on the Q9550.  Overall, I doubled my computers FPS through the upgrades and overclocking.