Do you overclock?

[M V]

I have recently done a lot of online research about overclocking, something I knew very little about previously. Doesn't it make sense for our industry to overclock all of our machines? My understanding is that all you need to do is cool your machine more effectively and change some bios settings and you can improve your render times a bit. Correct me if I am wrong here.

[David Arbogast]

I'm absolutely no expert regarding overclocking. I've never done it and and don't plan to either. Nothing I do in any other type of program (Photoshop, Revit, video game, etc.) stresses my CPU like rendering does. When Vray is doing it's final bucket pass on a rendering my I7-based PCs sound like jet engines ready for take-off. I'm not saying it can't be or shouldn't be done, but it just seems a whole lot riskier to do it for rendering speed (as compared with overclocking for better video game performance).

 

Does overclocking have any effect on the CPU's energy-saving features?

[frog_a_lot]

Make sure you have very good cooling system in place, otherwise your computer will overheat and die. It will give you an improvement in render speed, just be careful and dont take it too far. Watch your voltages as well.

[BVI]

Be careful when push up speeds beyond the manufacturers spec, you will probably void your warranty and experience some level of unstability. I think for hobbyists and gamers its a risk they are willing to take but for a business PC environment it may not be ideal.

[M V]

How about 8.43Ghz?

[M V]

Let's just say you can get 4.0Ghz from your processor by overclocking it and setting up liquid cooling. What does this mean for rendering speeds? Isn't time money in our industry? Wouldn't it be worth pushing our CPUs a little further in order to get better render times? I wonder if anyone has done a Cinebench test with this.

[RyderSK]

I've done my share of overclocking, even bought i7 2600K version so I could overclock than one to, atleast to 5ghz. But I didn't bothered later.

My reasons were back in time, most overclocking was done to get more immediate power for less money, esp. for games. But since most renders work over longer period of time, in my case 3-5 hourse per final image, it hardly improves these times, in spite of stability, which is way more important in longer tasts.

Even with best cooling, the stability goes down with higher frequency.