In my first entry to this series, Desktop PC Platform: Fears and Predictions, you were introduced to the basic framework of threats surrounding the desktop market segment. That article wasn’t meant to be a self-sufficient story, but instead provide an illustration of the chain of events that have precipitated to create the perfect storm. Desktop PCs are our life blood, after all, and you wouldn’t be here unless you held a vested interest in the future of this platform. I’ve already got more content prepared in support of my initial post, but this article will focus on one of the lesser-known threats: overclocking.
No, it’s not the act of overclocking itself that threatens the survival of desktop computers as a platform; it’s the overclocking market that’s killing the industry. Allow me to illustrate my point with a few passages from our recent Best CPU Cooler Performance series.
At its inception overclocking computer hardware was a tool for making the incapable, capable. Professional, students, enthusiasts, and countless personal users, all found that using the computer was more enjoyable when it kept up with the demands placed on it. For the longest time, the industry couldn’t sell a piece of hardware that satisfied the fast-paced tasks a user could throw at it. When it slowly began to happen, which is subjective due to individual perceptions of need, the computer component industry created an entire market segment dedicated to hardware enthusiasts and overclockers.
The age of overclocking hardware was born. Effectively standardized overnight, computer hardware components were separated into various categories of quality. There was budget, mainstream, professional, and then enthusiast. We’ve witnessed this trend for years now, as graphics solutions, processors, system memory, motherboards, and even power supplies have all be segregated by class. That’s when overclocking stopping being the solution, and became the problem.
The examples are everywhere: Intel’s $1000+ ‘Extreme Edition’ desktop processors, Gigabyte’s $700 GA-X58A-UD9 motherboard, and $300 system memory kits for overclockers. While there are people willing to buy these items, they often lose sight of the original purpose behind overclocking: making something slow become fast, and getting something more for no added cost. Tacking $2000 onto the price tag of your computer system is hardly keeping in the spirit of overclocking, and is more closely identified with showing off how much money you can spend. The problem only gets worse.
Back when I was taking my first baby steps into overclocking by risking everything to push a lousy Cyrix M-II 233MHz processor an extra 33MHz, the reward was a 15% bump in speed and a noticeable increase in performance. That was before computer hardware could keep up with user demands. These days, most hardware components are faster than you’ll ever need. Enthusiast-branded products simply mean you’re paying a premium for the privilege to own hardware capable of yielding an overclock… but once you’ve paid their price there’s no guarantee you’ll experience any difference.
