Should I upgrade, if yes which components? Or Overclock
Should I upgrade, if yes which components? Or Overclock
I'm an engineering student who hasn't played much gaming lately. Mostly I use modeling software and other engineering tools that can be quite demanding on the computer, especially when rendering images or videos and running certain programs. I'm curious if you'd recommend:
a) Overclocking my CPU. I'm not very familiar with this process and want to know if it could harm my system. Any advice or risks to consider?
or
b) Upgrading some components. Which parts should I look at upgrading? Could I just upgrade the CPU and GPU, or would I also need to replace the motherboard? I don't have much expertise in component compatibility.
My current setup includes:
- i5-6600k (CAM Monitor shows it's running up to 3.9 GHz)
- Radeon TM RX 480 GPU
- MSI Z170A PC Mate (MS-7971)
- 8 GB ADATA XPG (2x4GB, 3000 MHz) and 16 GB Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 16GB (2x8GB, DDR4 3200MHz C16), which I can only run at 2666 MHz due to timing differences.
Any suggestions would be really helpful!
Do you own a solid state drive or a mechanical hard drive?
What kind of technician are you, creating images or video?
I’ve experimented with adjusting RAM speeds manually—I think you can reach 3000MHz on both systems without affecting any other performance.
Honestly, your setup works just fine for your requirements. You might consider boosting your CPU’s clock speed while keeping the default voltage, which isn’t risky. A 4.5GHz all-core configuration (BIOS multiplier set to 45x at 1.2V) should be possible, though you may need to adjust the voltage offset to achieve that speed.
I own an SSD that hosts my operating system and primary applications, alongside a 7200 rpm 2 TB HDD used for games and bigger projects.
In mechanical engineering, I mainly work with part/assembly images—rendering them in Photoview 360 or Visualizer within Solidworks takes only a short time. However, when dealing with exploding or collapsing assembly videos at around 10 fps, it can take over an hour to render a 15-second clip. Using Photoview 360 seems efficient, using just the CPU and no GPU. Would it be faster if I could enable GPU usage?
Running FEA and CFD simulations is also demanding on the CPU.
I accidentally adjusted the BIOS settings right after adding more RAM, but encountered errors and performance didn’t improve. I’m unsure what I was doing, so I wasn’t certain if I was making mistakes.
Do you have any advice or resources where I can learn how to optimize this?
Could you tell me if it’s easy to figure out how to overclock through YouTube tutorials? Or is it more intuitive? Also, would upgrading to a 4.5 GHz processor still keep the system running smoothly, or would that cause issues quickly? I currently have about 3002 hours of usage.
Thank you very much for your response.