Overclocking Buyer's Guide - September 2004

Final Words

Anyone who is an overclocker (or wants to be) should be able to find something that grabs their interest in this Overclocking Guide. With a range of prices from about $900 to just over $2300 for core overclocking components, you should find an overclocking system that can meet your interests or your budget. It was not really our intention to do four Buyer's Guides while looking at overclocking, but it was hard to address what we believe Overclockers are looking for without addressing both the Performance and Value segments of overclocking.

This led to recommendations for an Athlon 64 Socket 939 system, a Prescott Socket 775 system, a "first-time" hot Athlon 64 Socket 754 system, and our first recommendation of a value Athlon 64 Overclocking alternative based on the Sempron 3100+. If our choices seem heavily weighted toward AMD, it is only because AMD systems are the ones topping most of the overclocking charts at the moment. If you need convincing, go to www.futuremark.com and look at any top ten list for 3DMark2001SE. 3DMark2001SE is heavily influenced by CPU speed, which makes it very useful for comparing overclocked processor performance. The later 3DMark2003 is more useful for comparing pure video performance since it is much more video centric. You may be surprised to find the 3DMark2001SE ORB shows AMD heavily at the top. If Intel was the current Overclocking darling, as they have been in the recent past, you would see more Intel systems in our recommendations.

We have barely touched on Heatsink/Fans in this Overclocking Buyer's Guide. In all cases, we assumed the retail HSF in our prices unless we stated an alternative as we did for the mobile 3200+ choice. You can always improve overclocking results even further with a better HSF, and we do intend to address HSF recommendations in a future update to the Overclocking Buyer's Guide.

Now, go build your dream overclocking system and let us know what you think in our front page comments section. Whether you agree or disagree with where the Overclocking Buyer's Guide is going, we would like to know what you think.