Evaluating the cost-benefit of extra overclocking expenses
Evaluating the cost-benefit of extra overclocking expenses
That is a risk I would not take on new hardware. Look at what happened with Raptor Lake Intel CPU's to see why. OC'ing is what you do to squeeze out some extra performance when you've gone overkill on the cooling (eg liquid cooling with large rad's) and the power budget isn't concerning. Like most 12th gen Intel and later CPU's I'd say it's too risky to OC, and same for AMD's Ryzen 5000 and later. They've pushed these CPU's to as close as you're going to get for stable, and paying money for that extra 1 or 2% is going to be undone with a BIOS update, so no.
Zen 3 CPUs operate with much lower stock voltages compared to today's Intel chips. Generally, for CPUs running at or below 1.35V it's completely fine, 1.36V to 1.45V is likely safe, and between 1.46V and 1.55V things begin to become risky. Of course, a 13900K with 1.65V supplied will quickly damage the silicon. My 5700X gets 1.1V at stock and 1.27V with the overclock enabled. Zen 3 offers a good margin for power use, cooling, voltage and speed. It's far more than 1% or 2%. You can reach 4.9GHz across all cores on a water-cooled 5700X, gaining at least a 7% boost.
And what's the extra power needed for it and the cooling? A 7% boost with a 25% rise in energy use might not be justified. As I mentioned, if your aim is to maximize hardware by spending on the best cooling system, a well-engineered chassis and powerful exhaust components could be risky. But if someone is spending $50 for an air-cooled CPU upgrade, it's probably not worth it.
Stock is 300% to 400% but power stays below 200W. Correct. It's achievable. Once I connected an old Hyper 212 Evo to my 5700X and boosted it to 4.75GHz all cores, the unit was built for around 150W. I could have used a NH-D15 better. I ran a Cinebench R23 test with it.
You can handle it yourself, but it won’t be very useful since today’s chips already provide most of the performance. It’s smarter to use the highest quality parts you can afford as a starting point.