There’s something alluring about squeezing every last possible drop of performance out of your gaming hardware. It’s difficult to be an avid PC game fan without being a technophile, and it’s hard to be a technophile without pushing your hardware to the limit. Overclocking has become a hobby in its own right, and you can find many online communities dedicated to the practice with a quick online search. In retrospect, I realize I’ve overclocked almost every system I’ve owned in the past 9 years. I know I’m not alone—Lionel mentioned to me that each of our videos about overclocking specific systems have been pretty popular (see XPS 700 video here, the XPS M1710 here and the XPS 630 and 730 overclocking videos here).
The first system I overclocked was an AMD based system sporting a K6-2 333 processor, pushing it to a meager 500MHz. By today’s standards, 500MHz is pretty puny, but at the time it was blazing, and the net increase in the processor’s performance was an impressive 50%. Others were pushing the limits much further, but my solution used stock air cooling with some extra case fans for good airflow. Overclocking that old machine required me to change the bus and multiplier settings by manually tinkering with pins on the motherboard. Oh how times have changed.
Sitting on my floor at home is a brand new XPS 730X sporting an i7-965 Extreme, 6GB of Tri-Channel DDR3, an ATI Radeon HD4870X2 video card, a 1TB RAID 0 array, and to top it off, a Killer NIC. You wouldn’t think a beast like this would need to be overclocked, but it certainly *begs* for it. Unlike “the old days”, overclocking the 730X is a simple process. In the following video, Russell and Phil demonstrate how easy it is, as well as show off the AlienFX and XPS Thermal Monitor software.
What can of performance increase can you expect by following the instructions they give in the video? Well, your mileage may of course vary, but I followed their instructions and would be happy to report the results I saw.
After setting the system to factory defaults, I ran benchmarks using 3DMark06, and scored an impressive 20,008. This number is nothing to scoff at. I then followed the instructions in the video, and ran the benchmarks again. The increase was marginal but consistent: 20,584. Both numbers are so high that you probably won’t see a huge difference in today’s games, as the system simply screams either way, but for the tech junkie who wants to see his hardware perform at its absolute best, the overclocking is certainly worthwhile.
For those of you at home, I’d love to see the numbers you came up with, and I’d love to see the numbers on the 730X H2C. Feel free to drop your numbers in the comments. Let’s compare notes, shall we?