Conclusion

Let’s sum up the total performance gains we achieved with our overclocking endeavors and see how well we measured up to our lofty expectations.

Looking at the average increase of 28%, it’s not hard to see the benefits of overclocking while gaming. The overall game’s percentage was knocked down due to the maximum settings used for Crysis testing, and when medium details were used, the percentage increase was 34% for Crysis instead of 14%, bringing the overall average up to 33%.

A stellar audio/video encoding increase of 57% overall and greater than 50% throughout the entire suite is the summit of this article’s overclocking data.

Checking out our other applications, we see exceptional gains in three of the five benchmarks with the overclocked PC. Low gains in AVG and WinRAR brought the overall application average down by quite a bit, but an average of 37% isn’t bad at all.

A total average performance increase of 41% speaks highly for this system’s ability to overclock and maximize the value of the money spent. Was it worth the extra $125 compared to last month’s system? Let’s decide by again looking at what upgrades were made possible with the increased budget: we were able to attain a case with better airflow, a beefier power supply better suited for upgrades, a larger and faster hard drive, a P45 based motherboard, a faster processor, a more powerful video card, twice the memory with tighter timings, and a higher overclock and percentage performance increase from overclocking. Not only did this PC blow out the $500 PC in almost every test, it managed to put up victories in half the applications tests versus the overclocked $1,500 PC, while even challenging the overclocked $4,500 system in a couple tests. In our book, if the funds are available, this all adds up to money well spent.