How does frequency on a CPU impact performance? I.e. if I overclock a 2Ghz CPU to 4Ghz, is it +100% performance?
In: Technology
It theoretically is, yes. Double the speed is double the calculations made. However, every other piece of hardware outside of the CPU may not be able to handle it and will throttle the results back, depending what you’re doing. Basically the CPU will generate a new result so quickly that when it knocks on the door of another asset – they’re still busy. The easiest case to understand is a traditional HDD with a platter. It’s fairly easy to generate more data than an HDD drive can write. This is true for everything else, in increasingly complicated ways – a PC is the collection of a lot of moving parts and the CPU is just one component.
Right now CPU’s are in a state that they are less often the bottleneck to performance than they were in the past. So upgrading your CPU tends to yield less beneficial results unless you’re specifically running programs that bend the CPU over hard.
For general gaming the GPU is holding up the show more often than not. If you’re running commercial/design software then you still can benefit greatly from overclocking the CPU, but you need fast and sufficient RAM, and disk writing capability paired up with it.
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