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Intel's lowly Celeron G6900 CPU gets overclocked to a staggering 5.3GHz:
Intel's lowly Celeron G6900 processor can be pepped up massively, an expert overclocker has shown us, pushing the Alder Lake chip to a rather staggering 57% above its default clock speed.
This feat was achieved by Der8auer, a well-known German overclocker who has set many previous records when juicing up chips, and managed to get the G6900 CPU to hit 5,338MHz (up from the default base clock speed of 3.4GHz).
What's even more interesting here, aside from a low-end chip blazing away at over 5.3GHz, is that of course this is a non-K processor – only Intel's 'K' model CPUs are officially able to be overclocked. However, with Alder Lake, other models can be ramped up, at least if they're running on a Z690 (high-end) motherboard, using the BCLK unlock capability in the BIOS (BCLK meaning base clock).
Recently Der8auer has also demonstrated overclocking other Alder Lake non-K processors including Intel's Core i5-12400, with seriously impressive results (reaching 5,240MHz across all cores). Plus in this new video, he shows the Intel Core i3-12100 hitting 5,400MHz – about 26% faster than its rated boost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @01:43PM (3 children)
I wanted to ask a related question, which is, what is the purpose of overclocking, especially these days where CPUs aren't advertised mainly on the numbers of GHz? Is CPU performance any kind of practical limitation for 95% of the people out there? I understand the "because it's there" argument, which is fine, but is there any reason I would want to take apart my computer to add external cooling systems other than to say I can do it?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @02:58PM
It's not as important as it used to be. It's not that clock speed doesn't matter, as much as that the manufacturers are leaving very little on the table. A decade ago you could get a CPU rated at 3 GHz and run it all the way up to the mid 5s. Now that CPU comes rated at 5GHz but has pretty much the same maximum speed. On top of that, water cooling used to be a big effort and now it's completely mainstream, to the point where the high end CPUs basically demand it. Which, in turn, lets the manufacturers claim speeds that would have previously only been available to overclockers.
Overclockers have not really developed any technology that is better than water but practical enough to be useful for anything other than record setting attempts. Part of the problem is that anything with below room temperature parts creates condensation, and that's a surprisingly obnoxious problem. I experimented with oil bath cooling and it "works" but it is never going to be mainstream. And nobody wants what amounts to a noisy refrigerator running next to their computer. Room temperature water cooling is pretty much the quietest possible cooling system besides passive air, it's not that expensive, and it's good enough to get 90% of the performance of more exotic systems. It's the real sweet spot. The only problem was people's fear of leaks. But that was a psychological hurdle, not a technical problem.
We might be coming to the end of overclocking being a useful thing for enthusiasts to do.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Wednesday January 19 2022, @04:31PM
Not sure about other fields, but in CNC programming, overclocking is not uncommon. Toolpath algorithms run on the CPU, rather than the GPU, and may take several minutes to generate in certain cases. Toolpath simulation makes better use of the GPU, but is still CPU intensive. Shop rate can be $100 to $300 per hour, maybe more, so every minute saved helps.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday January 19 2022, @06:12PM
You got some good answers. I'll say that as long as this works, these budget dual/quad/6-core CPUs become that much more attractive and they were already grabbing plenty of attention (the 6-core i5-12400 in particular). A simple 33% overclock would get the G6900 to 4.5 GHz. This is something that could actually be felt, improving its single-thread performance to beat a lot of older stuff, and improving the bad multi-thread performance (because it's only 2-core, 2-thread).
I think you are better off not overclocking most CPUs to cut down on power and heat. The 65W desktop APUs from AMD are more than enough performance for most people. On the other hand, if you have a Raspberry Pi 4 with a decent heatsink on it, you want to overclock that by at least 33% to 2 GHz. Because it is slow at any clock speed, and the stock clock speed is meant to enable the worst thermal situation (plastic case).
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