Suppose you hang around computer tech sites, channels, and blogs for long enough.
In that case, youre likely to hear the term overclock or overclocking.
But what is overclocking, and how does it work?
The clock is designed to provide a standard timing system for the gear.
The CPU and GPU have clocks that control their speed too.
A base clock and a boost clock.
The word boost certainly implies better performance and comes with a more significant number.
At its core, its really that simple.
Overclocking gets the name simply because you manually increase the clocks speed over its default.
Computer devices synchronized with clocks can only do a certain number of things per clock tick.
The exciting thing is, if you speed up the clock, they can do more per tick.
Caveats
There was a keyword in that last sentence.
Unfortunately, these things tend not to scale perfectly, especially when pushed quite far.
There is a range of reasons for this.
For one, many components in your box can be a limiting factor, bottlenecking performance.
Youve also got software issues, as many programs just dont fully utilize the hardware of modern computers.
There are also some significant limiting factors.
Power draw is one, while heat is another.
Running something faster uses more power.
This on its own produces more heat.
You should generally stay clear of that limit as it is not precisely defined or standard.
Generating lots of heat makes it harder to keep the component cool.
Again, components can only withstand so much heat and are designed to throttle themselves to prevent thermal damage.
This thermal throttling can easily result in lower performance than leaving everything at the default parameters.
How Does It Work?
Some products offer software options, while others need to be configured in the BIOS.
Some options are entirely manual, while others feature a one-click or low interaction option.
A CPU has its clock set from a clock on the motherboard.
This clock almost always runs at a clock rate of exactly 100MHz, or 100 million oscillations per second.
The CPU uses a multiplier to increase this number for its clock speed.
For example, a multiplier of 52 would get a clock speed of 5.2GHz.
CPU overclocking can be as simple as adjusting this multiplier.
Of course, there are many more options if you want to go more in-depth.
A GPU runs its own separate clock.
This can almost always be adjusted via software.
The exact naming may vary, but you often need to increase the power target to overclock a GPU.
see to it to use small steps as GPUs are very expensive.
you’re able to damage them if you push too hard.
RAM overclocking involves configuring the clock speed but also a large number of timings.
These are very extensive, really in-depth, and interwoven.
It can take days or weeks for an experienced user to tune RAM timings optimally.
Manual RAM overclocking is generally not recommended unless you know what youre doing.
Only make tiny adjustments in voltage.
Typically, you’ve got the option to make adjustments in millivolts.
If a component takes 1.500V, adjusting it by 0.015V would be a big change.
Its critical to test your stability after basically any change.
This involves not just booting the computer up but putting it under stress too.
Some configurations may be barely unstable and can crash after a few minutes in a game or benchmark.
In some cases, it can take hours for stability issues to show.
Overclocking requires pretty good cooling, especially if youve increased the voltage.
This can affect the ambient temperature of your room if you dont have adequate air circulation in and out.
The cooling ability of any cooler depends on the ambient temperature.
A hot room will result in even hotter components, potentially having to thermal throttle to prevent damage.
If youve got liquid-cooled radiators, venture to ensure they heat the air as it leaves the computer case.
Otherwise, you just increase the ambient temperature in your case, worsening the cooling of everything else.
As the names suggest, these involve increasing the clock multiplier for all CPU cores or just one.
An all-core overclock will benefit you in big multithreaded workloads like video rendering.
This is because overclocking increases the power draw and heat output, as we mentioned earlier.
You may also be able to push it a couple of multiplier steps further.
To be able to go higher, you may need to increase the CPUs voltage to get it stable.
Just be very careful when doing so to make tiny changes.
Its free extra performance if you have the thermal headroom, which is nice.
Still, youll often only see single-digit FPS increases.
For RAM overclocking, theres actually a simple, almost plug-and-play solution.
XMP or eXtreme Memory Profile allows RAM manufacturers to encode some timings for an overclocked performance mode.
Not all RAM offers XMP.
It wont squeeze the absolute most performance out of your RAM.
If you increase the clock rate, you must increase most of the timing values.
Not doing so will and making more than minor clock rate changes will almost certainly result in system stability.
For reference, if you doubled the RAM clock rate, you would also need to double most timings.
For example, in DDR4-3200, the CL timing is roughly half that found in DDR5-6400 RAM.
The bandwidth of the DDR5 is double that of the DDR4.
Conclusion
Overclocking increases the performance of some computer components by increasing how fast their internal clock oscillates.
The name literally comes from the clock speed being raised over its default value.
In most cases, overclocking will refer to the CPU.
However, other components can also be overclocked.
Overclocking is generally a manual process.
However, many tools exist to help.
There are also software tools that can at least partially automate the manual process.
Overclocking does come with some risks.
It almost always voids your warranty and can even void the warranty of some other components of your box.
It can also result in permanent hardware damage or even outright kill components.
These guides can help point out easy wins and expected or dangerous pitfalls.
