That’s what happens when
a) the CPU manufacturer drives the chips to the absolute limit in order to “win the benchmarks”
b) then the mainboard manufacturer drives the chips even further in order to “win the benchmarks” and then
c) the user goes over even that because the CPU is “overclockable” (which is sold as a feature) and one wants to “win the benchmarks”
And all of that, while the added performance of high-tier CPUs and/or overclocking, is often minimal in the grand scheme of things at best. CPUs get marketed and hyped by the media with percentages, not with absolute numbers. Want to know why that is? Because a “10% performance increase” sounds substantial, right? Well, humans are rubbish when it comes to intuition and numbers. A 10% performance plus is an increase from 100FPS to 110FPS. Depending on how sensitive you are to FPS, that might be visible, for many others it’s just not. Yet, those increases come at hefty costs regarding power consumption and heat generated, usually.
The lesson is:
Going for the fastest, beefiest CPU is a bad idea in about 90% of use cases, I’d say.
For the average enthusiast, CPU overclocking is dead. Unless you really know what you are doing and you have a powerful liquid cooling system, it’s just not worth it to risk CPU overclocking. Modern desktop CPUs have very little headroom left.
In a sense this is a good thing, we get max performance by default.
That’s what happens when a) the CPU manufacturer drives the chips to the absolute limit in order to “win the benchmarks” b) then the mainboard manufacturer drives the chips even further in order to “win the benchmarks” and then c) the user goes over even that because the CPU is “overclockable” (which is sold as a feature) and one wants to “win the benchmarks”
And all of that, while the added performance of high-tier CPUs and/or overclocking, is often minimal in the grand scheme of things at best. CPUs get marketed and hyped by the media with percentages, not with absolute numbers. Want to know why that is? Because a “10% performance increase” sounds substantial, right? Well, humans are rubbish when it comes to intuition and numbers. A 10% performance plus is an increase from 100FPS to 110FPS. Depending on how sensitive you are to FPS, that might be visible, for many others it’s just not. Yet, those increases come at hefty costs regarding power consumption and heat generated, usually. The lesson is: Going for the fastest, beefiest CPU is a bad idea in about 90% of use cases, I’d say.
For the average enthusiast, CPU overclocking is dead. Unless you really know what you are doing and you have a powerful liquid cooling system, it’s just not worth it to risk CPU overclocking. Modern desktop CPUs have very little headroom left.
In a sense this is a good thing, we get max performance by default.