Hm, well I apologize if I misunderstood anything. But I do have to chime in to counterpoint on a few things, because I think the topic does pertain to people other than the average Joe.
b1lk1 said:
What I DO mean to infer is that the average Joe can now EASILY get a 25% overclock with pretty much any Intel CPU and pretty much and Intel based mid level or better motherboard. This group will never spend $300+ on a motherboard to get a 5% better overclock.
And as before I agree on all counts with ya here. Which is why we got into a discussion about extreme OCers, because the average Joe is almost always going to buy a cheap midrange board from Gigabyte, ASUS, MSI, or someone's budget board.
b1lk1 said:
All that aside, extreme overcloclers make up less than 1% of the people that will buy hardware. Hardware companies routinely give these people their hardware for free for the advertising value. I would dare say that 80%+ of the known people haven't paid for hardware in years. I can link to post after post of these guys stating how easy it is to get free stuff. The people that actually pay $300 for a motherboard are extremely unlikely to go and punish it harshly just for a better benchmark score.
As I said above I agree, it's around that 1-5% area. But I do tend to browse the XS forums even when not active there myself, and I had seen plenty of that <5% that have actually bought multiple $250+ motherboards, it's almost impossible to not see someone that hasn't when browsing the extreme overclocking subforums. Not even including the separate subforums for dry ice, chilled watercooling, and LN2. I have seen enough sponsored OC events and buidls to know the more famous guys can generally get stuff for free, but I am not referring to them nor the random enthusiast that is able to get a special project / build sponsored.
Usually if the person is of the type to consider a $300 motherboard to be irreplaceable they are not going to be doing any extreme overclocking with it because they can't afford to replace it. Some of the people that populate these forums in the XS community have the means, and would just go out any buy a second $300 board if they broke the first one, and I've seen that as well. Some users even had lists of all the boards they'd played with with the results from each, with quite a few KIA's from random subzero accidents on them.
b1lk1 said:
DFI was the king back in the AMD days. Nvidia's lack of skill in making a decent chipset since the NF4 was one of the biggest nails in DFI's coffin. Thankfully for all of us, Intel came out with Core 2 and overclocking was made simple.
True enough. What is amusing to me is many have been saying overclocking was no longer simple because of
Nehalem.
b1lk1 said:
Extreme overclocking is certainly not dead, but it is nowhere near as exciting as it was when you had to struggle for even a 10% overclock.
Perhaps, but everyone has their own opinions on that. There are plenty of enthusiasts that do share your view and agree with it.
But that said, personally I just know that I derive plenty of excitement over overclocking measured in GHz and being able to actually use it for something. Having a 100% overclock on an E6300 using a $140 GA-965P-DS3 motherboard was a blast for me, figuring out what to tune in order to run the cheapest C2D 1.86Ghz processor at 3.72GHz on air, without dangerous voltages, was fun.
While not as impressive an overclock I would say it is
even more exciting to take a much more powerful CPU like the Core i7 up an extra ~1,500MHz because of the real world benefits. It might not be exceptional, but it's a useful overclock that I see results from in general everyday use, and especially see gains from with intensive programs such as folding@home. Being able to take a large overclock and actually use it 24/7 is what I can't get enough of. Which is partly how I've resist the urge to find a subzero cooler, such as OCZ's Cryo-Z... it's still tempting though.
