OC Confusion

I bought my rig from DS almost a year ago, and was supposed to get a modest overclock as part of the deal: "CPU Boost: FREE: Overclock the processor between 3.6GHz to 3.9GHz." I'm not much of techy, so I assumed the OC was in place and went on my merry way, and the system has been running fine. However, I finally decided to poke around a bit, and as far as I can tell, nothing was actually OD'd:



Am I missing something, or looking in the wrong place with the wrong tools? Was my i5 OC'd? As I said, the system's been running fine, but if I could squeeze some additional speed out of it, then I certainly would like to -- especially since I was supposed to get the OC in the first place.

I understand the confusion as I did not know how it worked either. It used to be back in the day that if you over clocked a CPU it would stay at that speed all the time. That's not the case any more and all modern CPUs will actually reduce their own speed when not under a load.

They will actually run slower then their advertised stock speed to save power and wear and tear on the CPU when it is not needed. For example my 2600k, with a stock speeds of 3.4GHz, will actually run at only 1.6GHz while not in game. Even right now when I have 5 browser windows running, one of which is Netflix, I am still only running at 1.6GHz.

But if I stress test my GPU or run a game it will increase to the 4.4GHz over clock that I have on it. Checking the speed while in game can be tricky as it can some times not jump up until being in game for a few seconds and can jump back down before alt-tabing out to check it.

What you can do is get Prime95 which is the program DS uses to test the over clocks they put on CPUs. Just run CPU-z at the same time like Tidgxor said and you'll see your speed jump up.

Any program you use that inspects your system, including the info displayed by Windows, will only show the stock information for the various components. It just reads you have a 2500k which has a stock speed of 3.3GHz, it does not actually check the speed the CPU is running at. You need a program like CPU-z to see that.

Glad you got it figured out!

Given the nature of Skyrim, its possible that your actual OC is higher than 3.6 Ghz, thats just what Skyrim is pushing the CPU to. Something like Prime95 as jmaster299 mentioned will really hit the CPU. But, at this point, you know you have the overclock you ordered, so all is well .