Originally Posted by
Particle
< This guy. When I was running a dual Istanbul setup between last July and earlier this year, I really wanted to overclock it. I did, to a limited degree, on my first (nVidia) motherboard.
Why? Because I do some of everything. When I'm compiling FPGA programming files during development, that's unfortunately a single-threaded process that takes a long time. At 2.2 GHz, you're looking at a minute and a half to two minutes every time you want to test a configuration. It's not like Visual Studio where you hit F5 to check your changes and the thing instantly starts up. When I'm relaxing by playing games, that's mildly threaded. Most games don't do their best with more cores and lower clock frequencies, though a few like Bioshock do fine. For the most part though, my gaming experience really tanked when I went from a Phenom II X4 940 @ 3.6 GHz to the dual Istanbul @ 2.2-2.5 GHz. And finally I do some video work which tends to take advantage of more cores quite nicely...some times.
It's never fast enough though. A Thuban overclocked to 4GHz, which isn't terribly difficult, can turn in throughput very close to what I used to get out of my dual Istanbul station. That was the point I decided to switch. If I had been able to overclock that platform, the question of changing or not wouldn't have been so easy to answer.