What to look for when shopping around for new pc

[Gee]

Thanks BrianG. Good info. I guess I am going to have to ask now. What is overclocking?

[zeropointbug]

Overclocking is simply put, getting much more out of your CPU that it would at default speeds. Say, you have three choices of CPU's, a 2.8Ghz, 3Ghz, 3.2Ghz and the costs of each are 180, 210, and 300 respectively. Now, obviously the two cheaper ones have much better performance/dollar. So, if you do your buying right, get a decent motherboard and a good heatsink, you can drastically increase the clock speed or "Ghz" of your CPU. So, seeing as all three of these CPU's are basically identical, except for the fact that they are binned differently as far as quality (how they would handle high heat, high stress situations), the higher clocked ones can handle just a little bit more, but not much really. So, when you overclock, you can either OC as far as you can on default CPU core volts (which is pretty easy these days), or you can increase the core volts and take it much further, provided you have a good heatsink.

So, take the $210 3ghz chip for example, relatively comparable what you would get with a real CPU these days, you could increase clock speed to 3.6ghz to 3.8ghz (depends on your luck, as not all components are made equal). Now if you want to take it further, you can increase core volts from say 1.25 default volts to 1.35 volts (or vcore), then, you should be able to increase the speed up to 4.0ghz, or even 4.2ghz.

So you can see that by getting a lower end chip and getting a better heatsink instead with the money you save, you can increase the clock speed far past the most expensive chip model.

I would recommend a heatsink such as the Noctua NH-U12P, as it is very quiet and performs very well.

[BrianG]

I used to overclock my rig a while back, but found it didn't really give me all that much more perceived performance for the heat it produced. Not to mention possibly reducing the lifespan of the CPU. Raising the speed and maybe core voltage (increased to make the CPU stable at the overclocked speed) will require more power and create more heat. It depends on what you plan to do with it: are you going to be running games or applications where every last MHz counts? If the answer is yes, then overclocking makes sense. If the answer is no, then you don't gain a whole lot other than faster benchmarks.

And it's not just about the CPU; some motherboards are more "overclocking friendly" than others. Will the switching FETs be able to handle the increase in current that an overclocked CPU will pull? Will the rest of the board remain stable at the higher speed? This is where research in the mobo you are looking at is needed. Some boards may say the can overclock to whatever level, but read user reviews to know the true story.

[zeropointbug]

Reviews are everything yeah. I think if you don't even know what overclocking is, the the safest bet is to only use stock volts and OC as far as you can, as this does not increase power and heat much at all, it's when you increase core voltage when heat dissipation increases, and fast, as it's exponential to the voltage you are putting through it.

You don't really want to do what I do with overclocking, as I have a core 2 duo E8400 overclocked from the stock 3.0ghz to a very large OC of 4.2Ghz. Just as an example of how fast the heat dissipation can increase on the high end, going from 4.2ghz to 4.4ghz increases loaded system power consumption from ~200watts, to a massive 290watts. That is an extra 90watts extra from the little CPU cores, and for 200mhz extra , is NOT worth it, as you can see. If you are wondering how I measure power consumption, I have a wall outlet power meter.