An Interesting Discussion on Reddit about Overclocking

I'm a firm believer that reddit (https://www.reddit.com/) is a rather pointless web platform filled with millennial idiocy and pr0n but, every once in awhile there are interesting things to be found.  For instance, in the /r/overclocking subreddit you would image there to be discussions about overclocking but, instead you normally find folks asking for technical help with questions formed as clickbait to find out if water in their PSU is bad. *roll*

One thread caught my eye and I’m going to repost my interaction here, just for fun.

Title: Good, cheap X79 Motherboard?
I'm looking for a good and cheap X79 motherboard to pair along with my Xeon E5-2670, but I can only find Intel X79 motherboards under $200 and I don't have much of a budget for the motherboard so I'm scrambling to find a good and cheap X79 motherboard for overclocking the E5-2670 and as an overall good motherboard. Do you guys have any recommended X79 motherboards?

Also, I'm beginning to dabble into overclocking and GPU overclocking seems easy enough with MSI Afterburner, you just max out the settings and look at the stress, right? (I'm a newb at overclocking. Will be using a EVGA GTX 1060 6GB SC as my GPU.)

I'm completely lost on overclocking CPUs, though, so if anyone could help me with overclocking an E5-2670, that be amazing.

Will use a Cryorig H7 and Kingston HyperX 16GB 1600mhz DDR3 RAM.

Thanks everyone!

Ok so the question mark is suspect but I figured hey, let’s reply and see what happens. 

What really bothers me about reddit is that some readers really are asking for help while others appear to be unable to make a decision on their own.  This poster appears to frequent Overclock.net given their knowledge of the LGA 2011 Xeon so it makes me wonder why they even bothered asking.

Here was my reply.

GTX 1060 isn't all that good for overclocking, Sure you can crank a few extra Mhz but the performance gain isn't all that much. Then again I'm speaking from LN2 exp and for me "on air" overclocking is kinda pointless.

As for the X79 mobo it depends on what you want to do. Not many of them support Xeon CPUs so you'll be limited by making sure the UEFI supports your CPU "and" has overclocking adjustments. For the most part all of the big mfgs support what you will need so it comes down to features you want and if you plan to go subzero at some point.

No solid recommends but, I'm a fan of the X79 Dark, X79 ROG "whatever" and the MSI X79 Xpower. All do great on LN2/SS, if you want air the Asus P9X79 is good along with most anything from Gigabyte or MSI. (seeing a trend here? thought you might)

Whatever you decide make sure the VRM is cool else you'll run into stability problems and invest in a decent cooler. Not saying the Cryorig H7 is a bad cooler but, I find it difficult to take any heatsink you can buy at Walmart serious. #justsayin Think AIO or a single 6-pipe tower with dual fans (push+pull).

It would seem my GTX 1060 comment ruffled some feathers and spawned three independent replies and by far this is the best one.

[–]flipmatthew 1 point 1 day ago*
You saying air overclocking is pointless is stupid, sounds elitist, and goes againstthe point of overclocking: Get the most performance for you dollar. I have a full water loop, I get that it's better, but don't shit on it. Air does really well now too.

[–]redmax_4930K@5.1Ghz 1.45v 1 point 1 day ago
I'm not trying to sound like I am against overclocking, I do it all the time and even have special equipment to get the most from my overclocking. The point is the actual performance gains from overclocking are getting smaller (duh). Sure, you can say I have a GTX 10XX card running at 2Ghz but if you're already pushing 100FPS in a game that extra 10 isn't going to do you any good.

Likewise getting the most from your dollar is an illusion when you can't buy a waterblock for a GTX 1060 or cannot buy a VRM block for an X79. Same is true when board makers overbuild a PCB but are unable to offer the tools required to unlock the card.

Casual (air/water) overclocking is bought these days and how far you push it is based entirely on how much you spend.

[–]flipmatthew 2 points 22 hours ago
Great points!! Always nice to hear a different perspective (also, it's sad but true that a lot of it is bought today

There were some others, mostly arguing that the GTX 1060 overclocks soooooo well and how could I ever say it didn't.  The way the NVidia marketing is written (which is evil good btw) it makes it seem like the Pascal cards are amazing overclockers.  And they are if you look at base clock vs overclocked boost clock.  Thing people don't realize is that the cards run on boost 100% of the time and often boost past what is advertised when conditions are good.

So ya, the card is overclocking itself and most manual tweaks just cause the card to become unstable.  #thanksnvidia