In a previous post, I took overclocking my hackintosh to the extreme, i.e. the last point in which the workstation still was able to properly boot and run cinebench. Those settings were reached by slowly bringing up all the clocks during one session. Meaning, at the beginning everything was cold, but during tempering, the system was at an upper operation temperature.
The same settings, which worked nicely with a warm system, cause the workstation to cease up when I tried to boot it after cooling down, i.e. the next day. This 5.x GHz clock was a bit too much for my humble Core i5-3570k when cold. Probably drawing too much DC-power.
For daily business, I backed off from those super intense setting, playing it safe with the following parameters:
- basic CPU clock speed: 4.4GHz
- one core active: 4.8GHz
- two cores active: 4.7GHz
- three cores active: 4.6GHz
- four cores active: 4.5GHz
Compared to the standard settings 3.4GHz base clock speed, with unlocked speeds up to 3.8GHz, the workstation is much snappier now.
The temperatures are moderate, no increase worth to be mentioned.
Some experimentation took place with the DDR3 clock speed. When going too high, the computer would not boot up. However, for the rest, I am not sure if overclocking adds anything to the performance. Also, overclocked or not, the temperature of those ginormous DDR3 heat sinks did not change at all. Anyways I am not sure why industry presently presents us with those huge heat sinks, or even water cooling, for DDR3-RAM... but this is another topic all together.
