There are two tiers of graphics cards out there, those that are worthy of overclocking and those that aren’t. Architecture differences, namely memory bandwidth, are the biggest roadblock to overclocking effectiveness.

TweakTown has a look at how well the Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 handles some increased clock speeds and it’s not looking so hot:

You’re not going to get a game changing experience with the extra clocks on offer and when you look through the graphs you see that the performance increase is only a couple of FPS here and there, which doesn’t sound all that impressive.

If you intend on grabbing a Radeon HD 5670 with some tweaking on your mind you might just want to save up and go for something with a wider memory bus width otherwise appreciate it for what it is as a media accelerating, low-power using, mid-range card.

Heatsinks are a "good enough" cooling solution that can easily be overwhelmed by newer and hotter running chips so many enthusiasts choose to go with a watercooling setup in order to keep things in check and even that isn’t enough for some folks so they take the next logical step.

MADSHRIMPS has a go with Intel’s Core i5 750 processor running under air cooling, phase change cooling, and some liquid nitrogen cooling for fun:

As for this page in the article, I had originally nothing planned. However, MSI asked me to send this chip back in order to receive an i5 750 retail so the night before the chip went back to the MSI labs I mounting the modified Mach2 unit and hoped I could get something decent out of this chip. In the end, I was actually quite surprised by the quality or rather, by the scaling with the turbo multipliers. At multiplier 22x I was rather quickly maxed out with a maximum of 214MHz BCLK, but using the 25x multiplier for single core benching turned out to be a winner.

Insane clock rates but you’re going to need a rather exotic setup in order to keep it cool enough to reach these speeds, and, well, liquid nitrogen is entirely unworkable unless you have an army of gnomes at your disposal. Crafty gnomes.

We all enjoy cheap PC components as much as the next guy but there’s a reason they’re cheap, they stick to components and designs that are stable at or around their shipped speeds. That won’t cut it for the speed freaks out there now will it?

Benchmark Reviews has a look at the ASUS GeForce GTX 285 Matrix graphics card and its finely tweaked design and cooling setup. Here’s a look:

Cooling is one of the most obvious upgrades for a video card. The single blower wheel at the front of the card doesn’t look very impressive, compared to some of the dual and triple fan designs that have been on offer for a while now. It’s what’s hidden behind the shroud that makes the cooling solution of the ASUS GTX285 MATRIX special. The Extreme Cooler starts with a noticeable trio of 8mm diameter heat pipes mounted on a big copper block, that transfer the heat away from the large top surface of the GTX285 chip package. Later, we’ll see there’s something more hidden under the surface of this cooler. Through the pipes, heat gets sent to a big, chunky set of aluminum fins, and then out the back of the card as warm air.

An impressive card with enough overclocking options to keep you busy for days…instead of, you know, playing games. Who has time for that?

AMD has a habit of putting reasonably powerful graphics cores into a number of their chipsets. Their upcoming 785G is another example sporting a custom built Radeon HD 4200 core that might enable your low-power build to do something other than feed videos.

neoseeker has a look at the 785G powered ASUS 785TD-V EVO motherboard which just so happens to have 128MB of sideport memory added into the mix, they even go so far as to try out some overclocking. Here’s a peek:

The 785G also proved to be a great movie decoder, thanks to the Unified Video Decoder 2 technology. With it, great energy savings can be achieved, since the processor can throttle while the HD 4200 handles almost all the decoding. Even with both the CPU and GPU under full load, the system did not go over 137W.

Some peppy performance from their new chipset although don’t expect insanely high-res gaming from it.

There’s that fine line in overclocking where a few more MHz here and there add up to an unstable computer. Spending hours in the BIOS finding all the right settings then trawling around forums for those specialized overclocking tools that change settings in your OS can be time consuming and rewarding.

Then again you could go the easy route.

bit-tech has a look at the Asus OC Station which allows you to simply turn a dial in order to overclock your system should your Asus motherboard support it. Here’s a look:

Not only that, but the OC Station polls the hardware monitor in the BIOS to display the temperatures of your components, which should help you to adjust fan speeds (and component voltages) accordingly. You can save profiles to the OC Station, so you could set up an undervolted profile for when you want some peace and quiet, and then switch to your aggressive overcommit before launching a game.

A fan controller, system information displaying, slick looking drive bay gadget. What more could you want?

It used to be that motherboard manufacturers would release their products and allow for the enthusiasts and tweakers to get the most out of their products, now they’ve started to take all of that fun for themselves before the boards even hit retail shelves.

Asus has been toying around with their new Intel P55 chipset based P7P55D motherboard series and has come up with some impressive overclocking performance with the upcoming Intel Core i5 processors. ExtremeTech has the details and photos to prove it:

What we saw were a handful of welcome design additions that demonstrate smart engineering and should aid ease of use, such as the new T.Probe, a chip that keeps heat levels uniform across the board by monitoring the temperature of the board’s mosfets in realtime. This chip can dynamically regulate their powerphases to ensure mosfets don’t run too hot, which prolongs their lifetime and that of your board. Other features: the Stack Cool3+ system (Asus has added extra layers of silicon and copper to certain areas of the board for more effective cooling and heat dissipation), and Turbo.V overclocking, a hardware system to ensure consistent and safe overclocking—I’ll describe it in a bit more detail shortly.

Impressive performance out of the gate although they are running some engineering samples which, almost always, perform better than their retail siblings.

AMD’s Phenom II CPU lineup brought the company some much needed attention at a time when the competition was trouncing them in every benchmark imaginable. Well they’re still doing that but at least they’re producing a chip that can hold its own with the previous generation.

RBMODS has a look at the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition which offers an unlocked multiplier which should be especially tempting for enthusiasts. Here’s a peek:

We were able to push the CPU a bit more from stock speed. We actually ended up at 250 FSB, to do this we raised the Vcore to 1,4125 and 0,25V on the ram. As we can see we had a 63 seconds drop on the 8M run in SuperPi.

These numbers are not bad at all, but something that amazed me was that it still ran quite cool and our air cooling was able to handle it. This proves that AMD has maken a cooler CPU than the previous versions.

It’s a cheaper platform than the Intel Core i7 but still faces some competition from the Core 2 lineup but given this chip’s overclocking features tweakers will surely reach for it.

We’re finding more and more high performance chipsets making their way to the MicroATX form factor quicker than ever before. Intel’s X58 is, of course, your only option if you want to make use of their Core i7 CPU so getting that sort of power into a small space sure is exciting.

AnandTech has a look at the MSI X58M motherboard which combines most of the great features you’ll find in larger ATX boards in a tiny package. Here’s a peek:

Well, MSI tried their best to hit the $150 mark and might still make it if rumored price cuts on the X58 hold true in the near future. The board MSI is targeting into the entry level X58 market is the X58M and it arrives in a uATX form factor with an MSRP of $169.99. It’s close to the eventual $150 price point but this motherboard is anything but entry level in many ways. The board features the X58 IOH, ICH10R with six 3Gb/s SATA ports, JMicron JMB363 for an additional 3GB/s SATA port, IDE support, and an eSATA port. Also included from the land of Crabs is the Realtek ALC 889 HD audio codec and RTL8111C Gigabyte LAN. MSI even tossed in IEEE 1394a support along with a great layout and overclocking friendly BIOS backed up by some excellent electrical components.

Overclocking, a full feature set, all at a reasonable price tag? Highly impressive!