To overclock or not to overclock, that is the question...

Hello all,

I have recently bought a gaming desktop pc 2nd hand, I have had laptops in the past and came to the conclusion that desktop is the way to go if I want to game.
Specs are below;
EVGA Hadron Air Mini-ITX
I5 4690k 3.50GHz
16gb DDR3 666MHz
ASUSTeK Z971-PLUS
NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB
238GB SSD

So when I first got it I started playing Far Cry 4 at 1080p on ultra settings, although I was getting good fps staying well above 60 after 20mins or so the game would freeze up and I need to restart. After running a stress test I saw that my graphics card was getting beyond 80c which worried me. I downloaded and installed MSI Afterburner and let the software take care of the fans, the following stress test showed the card getting to max 65c which I think is a great improvement for the sacrifice of a little noise.

My temps while running far cry 4 at 1080p on ultra are GPU 55c & CPU 70c.

1st question is... Is 70c for the cpu too high? I must admit I do have the main fans set to silent mode as I just prefer it to be quiet but I can tell you I have gamed when fans where at the max all the time and the temp was 60c.

Second question is... The guy I bought the pc from told me I can overclock the cpu to 4.2Ghz. I am unsure what benefit this will be for gaming and is it worth the risk?

James

70c was the gaming temp. Normally lays at 35c at idle

After some reading up I understand that speccy reports half of the ram speed so 666mhz was actually 1332mhz.

I have now set up the xmp profile in bios also I have gone through the 'ez tuning wizard ' (which I understand is a mild form of safe overclocking) and selected my setup and it showed it will apply a 20% boost to ram and a 28% boost to cpu.

Now the speeds are ram 815mhz (1630mhz total), cpu is still at 3.50ghz but it changed the turbo speed from 3.70ghz to 4.48ghz.

I understand that with the higher clock speeds comes higher temperatures so I'll monitor this and adjust fans if needed.

- - - Updated - - -

i just done a heaven benchmark and the results where a couple of degrees higher temps and a slightly better score than before OC.

I would check your voltages. Those "easy tune" usually Jack the voltages up way too high, sometimes unsafely high. If you overclock, you should do it manually and tune the voltages yourself A 28% overclock is pretty significant.

Rule of thumb for overclocking:

"If you can't afford to replace it, don't overclock it."

A 28% overclock is pretty aggressive and you will really want to watch your temps with an overclock like that. Usually, an overclock that aggressive would call for liquid cooling, but your mileage may vary.

I wouldn't rely too much on auto overclocking. I agree with Geneo. Overclocking should be done by hand, carefully and by using baby steps to get the most out of your machine without damaging it.