Windows 7: OC'ing: Worth it these days?

Remember about 8 years ago when OC'ing a processor by 100 MHz was a big deal and actually made a big difference in performance? Admittedly, I haven't really overclocked a processor since then, so is there any real world benefit in doing so with the quad core/hexacore processors of today?

There is a noticable difference

Depends on the Application though

Games and Video encoding will see the best benefit as well as photo shop

Now days though even a Novice can overclock with a push of a button !

There has always been a "real world benefit" and it remains so.

Whether the benefit is worth the trouble is another question entirely.

8 years ago, the average user had lots of tasks that were limited by available CPU power. Even virus scans and defragmentation took a relatively long time.

But since that time, CPU power from the average non-overclocked system has increased to the point that fewer tasks are intolerably slow. Hardware gains have outpaced software.

It's up to you to decide if your particular tasks are "too slow" on your PC.

I think most people that overclock continue to do so as a hobby, irrespective of any cost/benefit analysis.

I have a 2.8GHz PhenomI X6 which I managed to OC to 4.2GHz and I really noticed no performance gain, the WEI went up a bit if that means much. I personally think OC'ing RAM has more of a benefit nowadays. That's where software lives in use so it helps out video and graphics tasks as Solarstarshines said.
It is a challenge to myself to see what I can push RAM and a CPU too. Of course I have seen more than my share of BSODs too.

All in all, I haven't seen much of a big bang out of over-clocking other than, in my case, CorelDraw or Photoshop opening and rendering faster.

Yep.

Aside from the odd CPU bound game/app that does show an improvement with a nice overclock, the impact isn't as large as it used to be. Especially with newer chips.

Those of us that continue to OC essentially do it 'because we can' rather than we really 'need' to.

These days I am satisfied with a bit more cooling then nessesary, as in better case for airflow - heat sink etc. But my next PC is likely to be a laptop so - meh.

i run my gaming rig stock, but with my ram underclocked as the difference between my rams current 1333mhz and its native 1866mhz will be minimal.

And as for my cpu, i cant see me needing any added performance anytime soon, considering the latest and greatest games dont need anymore, BF3 being the benchmark these days plays flawlessly maxed out.

I have an I5-2500K. I overclocked it to 4.0ghz, which had a temp increase of only a couple of degrees, and since the CPU runs at 25, that was fine.

My memory runs at 1600, and I don't bother overclocking it. I have 8GB

I use DVDFab, MultiAVCHd and ConvertXtoDVD. The difference in decoding/encoding was a few minutes on a 30gb blu-ray disk. Photoshop seems to load faster, and load large images faster, but only minimally.

I also have an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD and all applications run from there.

When temps reach 104F like today, I drop it back to stock as the improvements are not so great as to make it painful.

I Paid an extra $10 for the 'K' version of the 2500, so for that kind of price difference it really didn't make a difference.

All in all, overclocking for me, was really just for the sake of it.

The only things that brings my system to a crawl is copying large files from my computer to my server.

Agreed

Thanks for the tips, everybody. I'm expecting the delivery of my new computer parts today (was on a bit of a budget, ordered Core i5-2500K/Gigabyte board/Radeon HD 6870/8 GB DDR3-1600 RAM), and knowing how well the i5 handles overclocking, I was interested in doing so but wasn't sure if it was worth it in the end.