Alright, so you’ve built your PC or you’re looking into building one and you keep seeing something called “overclocking” come up. You may be asking yourself, “what is overclocking?”
Allow me to explain. Overclocking is the action of increasing a component’s clock rate or running it at a higher speed than it was designed to run. This is usually applies to the CPU or GPU, but other components can also be overclocked. Increasing a component’s clock rate causes it to perform more operations per second, but it also produces additional heat. Overclocking can help squeeze more performance out of your components, but they’ll often need additional cooling and care. For cooling I recommend Corsair’s Hydro Series, H100i RGB Platinum SE.
On an Intel CPU overclocking is a simple as making a few changes in your BIOS profile. Ryzen CPU’s on the other hand, are more difficult to overclock if you want to get the most out of the performance. Due to the nature of Ryzen’s “infinity mesh” you will also find yourself adjusting the clock speed of your memory so you can get the most power out of your CPU. Check out this guide discussing how you can get the most out of your DRAM using the popular Ryzen DRAM Calculator.
