Yet again the subject of Over clocking, RAID, SSD’s SLi, Crossfire and water cooling has arisen.
Over clocking if done right takes hours upon hours making tiny changes in the bios, testing for stability and then benchmarking to see what improvement in performance (if any) has been achieved, then rebooting and doing it all over again.
So you end up spending hours just so a program or a process will complete a few seconds faster. And it will never be enough, you will never be satisfied because you know with a little more voltage it could be even faster, all it would take is slightly better cooling.
That’s when you start looking at water cooling and it starts getting expensive.
Water cooling is a brilliant idea in theory, less so in practice. The biggest problem isn’t so much the cost (not to say the cost isn’t a problem) as much as where to put all the water cooling equipment you have just made yourself penniless acquiring.
You will spend a fortune on all the fancy equipment and as soon as you have finished you will see an article in a magazine or online about some fancy new high performance CPU you cant afford. Them you will realise if you hadn’t bought all those parts you could afford it and it would outperform your over clocked CPU without even having to wander into the bios
SSD”s are the new must have, and if it wasn’t for the price we would all be using them. But when you look at the performance of them many are actually no faster than conventional hard drives (but they are still more expensive), and many programs and processes are small enough to be used within the memory of the computer, so the speed of the HDD is irrelevant because all the data is held in the memory cache. And no matter how fast your hard drive its still slow compared to the speed of your Ram.
RAID arrays make even less sense when used in RAID 0, you pay twice the price for a tiny improvement in performance (i think when i benchmarked mine the improvement was less than 3%). RAID 1 makes far more sense, but its a bit boring so no one wants to do RAID 1 (but you should experiment with it).
SLi and Crossfire follow the same principle as RAID, if one graphics card is good, two graphics cards has to be better. and three has to be awesome (this is a formula developed by men and totally beyond womens understanding).
Lets face it if women ruled the world V8, V10, V12 and V16 engines would never have seen the light of day, we would have some of the most advanced washing machines instead.
HURRAY
It is better, but nowhere near enough to justify the cost
so my first words of wisdom are
DON’T DO IT
But all that said setting up RAID arrays, Over clocking, SSD’s SLi and building Water cooling into a computer will impart a vast amount of knowledge upon you, even if the one that sticks in your mind the most is WHAT A STUPID IDEA THAT WAS.
But it’s better to learn these things for yourself, so while my first words of wisdom would be don’t do it, my final words of wisdom would always be
GO FOR IT
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