If megahertz/gigahertz is a "myth" then why do people overclock their CPU?

[Anonymous]

You know the megahertz myth? That is what this question is referring to.

I always see people on Newegg talk about how much they OC'ed something. Even with the new dual core processors that promise greater performance at lower clock speeds, people are overclocking them from 4.0 Ghz to infinity. Why?

*over clocking them from 1.4 Ghz to 4.0 Ghz to infinity (I meant to say)

I didn't literally mean 4.0 Ghz, that was just a helpful exaggeration.

[dze]

the myth is using it to judge performance between different brands and types ... but any given cpu thats overclocked will be slightly faster ... especially within a type ... say amd X2 dual core ... u can overclock actually a step up or two with a good chip saving a hundred or more dollars on the listed higher performance chip ... and u cant overclock and be stable from 2ghz to 4 ... but its achievable to go from 2.2ghz to 2.7 and be stable coz im doing it ..

[PudgeDog]

Mostly because they can. Same reason people climb Everest. They can get a performance increase in some ways but not in others. Your computer is only as fast as it's slowest part. When they come out with an affordable flash hard drive I will be first in line.

[azawalli]

Back when I sold Macintosh computers for a living, people were constantly comparing Power PC RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Chip) chips to the Intel CISC (Complex Instruction Set Chip) chips in Windows boxes. The measure of comparison, of course, was the number of clock cycles a chip ran in a second, measured in megahertz. The Power PC chip could perform more operations per clock cycle than could Intel chips, making Power PC chips as powerful or more powerful than Intel chips, but this was always a difficult concept to sell to customers. The number of clock cycles per second, as measured in megahertz is only one measure of chip's processing power. Overclocking any chip will make it faster, but at some point you sacrifice reliability for speed.

[mattjirmanos]

Sorry dze.

You can run a e6600 easily at 4.0 ghz with proper cooling solutions.

The reason people overclock cpu's is because most enthusiasts can. If you can get more power out of the same product, why not? If you buy a car and you can make it run 2x as fast without spending any money, I'm sure most people would too.

You can buy a cheap processor that comes standard at 1.8 and run that easily at 3.0 ghz Then you can have an E6320 running at the same speed as a E6700 and pay much much less.