Un-Overclocking the Phenom II (Final Conclusion)

It’s been almost 2 weeks since my first post about overclocking my Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition.

Do you want to know the honest answer? I could tell no difference between 3.0 GHz and 3.4GHz unless I was running a benchmark, and even then it wasn’t an “unbelievable” difference.

Even in gaming, it didn’t make any difference (neither did a GPU overclock I tried as well on my Radeon HD4830). Why? I play all of my games with V-Sync enabled – which locks my FPS at 60fps, in sync with my LCD display. I’ve always thought games looked “better” or perhaps “smoother” with V-Sync on, so the overclocks simply didn’t help.

As for “desktop performance”? I’m not a media encoder, and I’m not a programmer that’s constantly compiling code – so those extra few seconds really don’t matter too me. My most CPU intensive task is running (multiple simultaneous) Virtual Machines, and in that respect the Quad-Core helps more than the raw clock speed.

This is a “long-term” system for me, and I simply decided not to do anything that could possibly shorten it’s lifespan.

Tinkering with the overclock was definitely fun (that Black Edition practically *begs* to be overclocked), and I can see why so many hobbyist do it – it’s like getting something for free. For me though, I would rather ensure a long life for my system and absolute stability rather than gain a few clock cycles.