**Overclocking Your Computer: A Comprehensive Guide**

When it comes to building and upgrading your computer, many users overlook one crucial aspect: overclocking. Overclocking involves pushing your system's components beyond their recommended specifications, allowing you to squeeze out extra performance from your hardware. In this article, we'll explore the world of overclocking, including how to do it on various parts of your computer.

**Fans and Cooling Systems**

When it comes to cooling systems, most users are aware that fans can be overclocked to increase airflow and reduce temperatures. However, not everyone knows about the importance of proper fan speed control. Most fans come with a pre-set speed, but some users may want to adjust this for better performance or reduced noise levels. The good news is that most modern fans can be overclocked using software tools. For example, our Noctua fan showed us that it could reach speeds of up to 55 decibels, which is around the same level as a normal conversation or an air conditioner.

However, even with proper cooling systems in place, overclocking your fans may not necessarily improve your system's performance. In fact, many fans are already running at their maximum capacity, and increasing speed may not provide significant benefits. Additionally, pushing fans too hard can lead to increased power consumption and reduced lifespan. So, while overclocking fans is possible, it's essential to weigh the pros and cons before making any adjustments.

**Mouse Overclocking**

For gaming enthusiasts, a fast and responsive mouse is crucial for high-performance gameplay. However, most mice have a pre-set polling rate, which determines how frequently the cursor updates on screen. This can lead to noticeable delays in fast-paced games. Fortunately, many modern gaming mice can be overclocked using software tools.

To overclock your mouse, you'll need to access the device's settings menu and adjust the polling rate. Most mice default to a high polling rate, such as 500 Hz, which can be adjusted using software tools or firmware updates. Some manufacturers, like Corsair and Razer, offer custom firmware that allows for more aggressive polling rates.

One example of a mouse overclocking system is the Logitech G502, which can be flashed with custom firmware to reach higher speeds. In this case, we were able to achieve a polling rate of 1000 Hz using a third-party firmware tool.

**Keyboard Overclocking**

While mice are often considered the focal point for gaming performance, keyboards can also be overclocked to enhance gameplay experience. However, keyboard overclocking is more complex and dependent on the manufacturer.

Some keyboards, like those from Corsair, offer adjustable switch settings that allow users to tweak the feel and response of individual switches. This can result in faster actuation times and improved accuracy for gamers.

However, other keyboards may not be compatible with overclocking, either due to technical limitations or design constraints. In these cases, users are out of luck.

**Monitor Overclocking**

For those with high-end graphics cards, monitor overclocking is a simple yet effective way to boost performance. By adjusting the refresh rate and response time, you can squeeze out extra frames per second from your display.

In our tests, we found that even a small increase in refresh rate, such as going from 60 Hz to 70 Hz, made a noticeable difference in gaming performance. However, it's essential to note that monitor overclocking requires a compatible graphics card and a recent version of Windows.

**Other Components**

While mice and keyboards can be overclocked, other components are not always compatible with adjustments. For example, SSDs (solid-state drives) are designed to operate at specific speeds and temperatures, making it difficult or impossible to overclock them.

However, some enthusiasts have found ways to push their hard drives beyond their recommended limits using specialized tools and techniques. While this may provide a temporary boost in performance, it's essential to note that these modifications can also increase the risk of hardware failure.

**Conclusion**

Overclocking is an art that requires patience, experimentation, and a good understanding of your system's components. While overclocking fans and mice can be relatively straightforward, keyboard and monitor overclocking are more complex and dependent on specific hardware configurations.

Before attempting to overclock any component, it's essential to research the recommended settings and potential risks involved. With proper knowledge and caution, however, you can unlock extra performance from your system and take your gaming experience to the next level.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyeah there you go today we are gonna take this pc and overclock overvolt or otherwise run beyond the manufacturer's specifications every single part of it that we can some of the stuff we're gonna do will seriously improve performance and some of it definitely won't big shout out to sonic by the way for sponsoring this craziness let's get started so it shouldn't be news to most of you that the first thing you need when you're overclocking is a solid power supply inadequate or unstable power can adversely affect stability so we chose the seasonic prime titanium fanless a seriously cool unit that is literally silent because it has no fan so it's the first thing that we're going to tune by plugging it into one of the 208 volt power outlets in the other unit so we're running on 120 volt right now sucking about 270 watts let's see what happens here all right so after a quick cable swap here for this beefy extension cord running out of the other room we're running at about 190 volts so there was some voltage drop and our same stress test is now between 255 and 260 watts this doesn't make anything faster but it does improve your system's efficiency though probably not enough that i would if you're in north america like run out and get 200 volt power put into your house now before doing anything else you're gonna want your motherboard's latest bios so you can see ours is so new that it has little animations in here you're also going to want the latest os updates and a handful of tuning utilities then you want to get some baseline readings in your preferred performance tests so you can make sure that any efforts you're making any dials that you're turning are actually doing something and that what they're doing is positive now we've done more detailed cpu overclocking guides in the past so we're going to skip over some details here but basically by adjusting our cpu multiplier to 51 and disabling svid we were able to get our core i5 8600k from 4.3 gigahertz on all cores to 5.1 gigahertz with all cores active at 1.275 volts so that's only a 0.005 volt increase and it yields a 20 or higher improvement in our cpu tests so we are off to a very good start now this is usually where we stop tooling around with the processor because cpu cache overclocking doesn't really help much outside of very memory intensive applications but not today after getting your cpu core dialed in you can actually start upping the cache until it's at a similar frequency to the core or until it causes uh stability problems so ours was able to go from 4 to 4.8 gigahertz with a little bit more cpu voltage which actually did manage to give us a measurable boost in cinebench now when it comes to ram overclocking we generally recommend staying away from xmp or other auto memory overclocking since while sometimes it works so it can be worth a shot other times it can be questionably stable as for our kit well it's rated at 3200 megahertz and our overclocking result was 3 200 megahertz even with extra voltage so we didn't technically overclock our ram but we did overclock our system past the jdec ddr4 spec so yeah we got an extra 27 points in cinebench so we're going to call that a success from there we did actually try fine-tuning the base clock of the system as well but especially given that we already had everything else like tuned to the red line it wasn't having any of it this whole thing is on the knife's edge of stability as it is so then with all the tuning we've done so far what do we get for our trouble how has this affected our gaming experience turns out we've netted a whopping 1.2 percent increase in 3d mark times by and a whole two fps in far cry 5. so it might be time to overclock our graphics my preferred strategy for this is msi afterburner in the foreground so we can make any adjustments that we'd like and some kind of stress test running in windowed mode in the background so we can monitor stability so you fire up afterburner grab that there power knob and rip it all the way to the max in our case it's like 112 some older gpus do let you go higher then you incrementally increase the core clock until the system becomes unstable so we landed on 150 megahertz for our core for our memory clock we ended up with plus 275 so you do that right after your core and this gave us more than a 10 frame per second increase in rise of the tomb raider although everything else hardly changed for some reason that's kind of weird why is that well as it turns out nvidia's gpu boost 3 was already turboing the card up close to 2 gigahertz without our adjustments that's much higher than the advertised 1683 that's because the cooling capabilities of this card are able to sustain it so that means that without overclocking you're actually getting close to the maximum performance you'd be able to out of a modern card like a which is great for most people but overclockers without bios modding and like physically modifying the card to apply more voltage to the gpu don't get a lot of performance gains to brag about so up until now everything has been like a nanaimo bar just goodness but there has been one downside thermals so under full load our processor for instance is about 15 degrees celsius hotter but what could we overclock to make the computer cooler what if we were to give more voltage to the fans so stashed in here where a hard drive would normally go is something pretty special this is a dc to dc converter so all we do is plug standard molex 12 volt into this side then alex is going to adjust this little potentiometer here go for it nice whoa can you hear that now we've got 17 volts coming out the other side which is where we have our fans attached so in ida 64 what kind of an improvement will we see bam cpu temps down to 69 degrees a seven degree improvement and all we had to give up was sound since this guy went from like i don't know 20 decibels or so we're not sure since it was below the sound floor of our office thanks in part to the fanless power supply up to 55 decibels which is around a normal conversation or an air conditioner this also by the way won't help the lifetime of your fans our noctuas actually might be fine but cheaper ones will likely end up letting out the magic blue smoke before long so i think pretty much everything inside the case is overclocked now but what about the things outside it like your mouse and your keyboard and your monitor can they be overclocked yes yes they can okay so for your mouse the pulling rate in windows is 125 hertz meaning that there can be up to eight milliseconds of lag between moving your mouse and it registering which can lead to noticeable delays in fast-paced games in windows 7 it was possible to overclock the polling rate on your usb ports which could be great if your mouse sensor could handle it but windows 8 and up have changed the way that usb drivers work and this is no longer possible fortunately a lot of gaming mouse manufacturers have found ways to solve this problem for you since most of them default to 500 hertz and you can use mouse rate to check yours for yourself so click and move your mouse around bippity boppity this is going to max out at 500. there you have it now with that said we can go higher this final mouse right here has a firmware tool that you can grab we get one crack at this by the way so uh and run to flash it to a 1 000 hertz firmware and then other mouse manufacturers like corsair and razer have software tools that work similarly let's just let this finish up and then we'll see if it worked hey success oh i can't even i can't even move it fast enough to get all the way to a thousand okay whatever it's definitely over 500. as for keyboards this is largely dependent on the manufacturer so this corsair one can actually be adjusted with this switch that's right on the back of it bear in mind of course that the reason they make this so easy is that it can affect compatibility with your system other keyboards may not be possible to overclock at all moving on to the monitor overclocking this is actually super easy if you've got an nvidia card all you need to do is go into change resolution right here then click customize tick enable resolutions not exposed by the display and create yourself a custom resolution accepting all of the terms and conditions and warnings that come along with it from here all you gotta do is dial in a new refresh rate then click test even a small increase over 60 hertz like going to 70 or 75 should make a very noticeable difference in games if you've got the gpu horsepower to drive it now there ended up being a few things that you can't overclock like your ssd or your hard drive like if you've got a 7200 rpm disc that's all she's got and the closest thing would be buying a faster drive in the first place like a wd velociraptor that spins at 10 000 rpm but like even that is much slower than an ssd also we tried pretty hard to get the webcam overclocked and while it's technically possible to increase the fps while decreasing the resolution our logitech unit just wouldn't play ball now i was really on the fence about including this but alex insisted that we include one last thing that you can overclock and it's probably the slowest thing about your computer you if you don't touch type learn to touch type also learn all of the keyboard shortcuts that you can and if you're doing the same operation often enough many modern keyboards allow you to program it as a macro key you only have to press one button to execute it and there's a joke here it's terrible since although you can't stop ai and machines from taking over maybe you can use these tips and tricks to stay useful for a little bit longer so big thanks to sea sonic for sponsoring this video it's pretty freaking cool that they were able to make a 600 watt power supply with literally zero noise and that they were cool with us than putting a super loud system around it uh thanks for watching you guys if this system this video sucked no the system doesn't suck the system is cool if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is our merge store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join all we've got to do you're in you're in you got it oh you're not in yeah not quite dang it alex like close to end okay you gotta you gotta finesse it okay you just gotta get the pins kind of in there and then you get a you're not in yet you know what you'll know when i'm in well yeah\n"