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What Clock Speed Means and Why It’s Not the Only Factor in Choosing a CPU

Tick, tock, is that a clock?

PostsFor years, people have tried to get better performance from CPUs (and other PC parts) by overclocking them—running the clock speed higher than it was designed for.

Overclocking isn't as simple as just turning a dial. A higher clock frequency usually needs more power, which makes every part between the power supply and the CPU work harder. Eventually, something in that chain will fail. A capacitor could burst, a resistor might burn out, and if you push too far, you could damage the CPU directly.

This is why enthusiast motherboards often use higher-quality components between the CPU and the power supply—in theory, they can handle delivering more power to the CPU before failing.

Heat is one of the biggest problems here, and extreme overclockers have gone to great lengths to design special cooling systems that remove as much heat from the CPU and surrounding power-delivery parts as possible. Some even use cryogenic liquids like liquid nitrogen, which is about -321F (-196C), to keep things as cool as possible.

You can overclock almost any component in a PC if you want, but CPUs, GPUs, and RAM are the most popular because they can lead to noticeable improvements in gaming performance.

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Posts Overclocking Made (Mostly) Irrelevant ---------------------------------------

CPUs don’t always run at their maximum frequency. In fact, if you open Task Manager and go to the Performance Tab, you’ll see the CPU speed changes constantly.

When you're doing light tasks, the CPU clock speed lowers to save power; when you're doing something heavy, the clock speed increases to provide more performance. This is especially important for laptops and mobile devices, where battery life is limited.

However, modern CPUs can also do the opposite automatically.

Automatically Boosting CPU Frequencies

To allow this changing performance level, CPU makers developed an approach called Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), which automatically adjusts the voltage and frequency of your CPU cores.

It can also be used to increase the clock frequency of your CPU in certain situations, especially when only a few cores need to run faster.

Different companies name this feature differently. Intel calls it "Turbo Boost," and AMD refers to it as "Precision Boost Overdrive," but the result is similar: when more performance is needed, the CPU frequency can automatically rise to meet that demand.

Unlike overclocking, boost frequencies aren’t fixed. Once the demand drops, the CPU frequency returns to normal. Also, boosting usually affects only a few cores at once, while overclocking typically applies to all CPU cores.

Limiting the boost to a few cores reduces the amount of extra heat produced and puts less strain on the power delivery system since you're boosting 2 cores instead of 16. And there's not much downside either. Most applications, especially games, can't fully use an 8- or 16-core CPU, so boosting all cores would mostly create more heat without real performance gains.

To prevent your CPU from damaging itself, CPU boost technologies also set limits on how high the clock speed can go. With overclocking, however, you can cause real, lasting damage if you’re not careful.

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Overclocking and boosting are not the same thing, and if you need to push multiple cores to their absolute limit, you might want to build a good cooling system and overclock your CPU. But for most gamers, overclocking is no longer necessary—boosting has made it a risky and unnecessary step.

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