Hello Jeff,

You are correct, overclocking is based on temperature and if your CPU allows for overclocking.

Going from 4.5 to 4.9GHZ may seem incremental, but that is a huge boost to performance. At this point, your bottleneck is most certainly cooling. If you ever check out a overclocking competition (I'll post a link below) they use liquid nitrogen to keep these units from exploding. Now, in a more practical sense, you can turn to water cooling or a large copper or silver/nickle heatsink. Back in 2009 I had a AMD Opteron that I clocked from 2.6 to 3.2 GHZ Stable, this was mostly due to Opterons being server chips designed for high voltage, but I was also using a pure copper heatsink that weighed about 3lbs.

Please keep in mind that guys running a 7700K at 5GHZ are most likely only doing this for benchmark results. It greatly reduces the life of your CPU, not to mention you run the risk of frying something. So Overclock at your discretion.

Water cooling has come a long way, here are some of the 2018 favorites: https://www.pcgamer.com/best-cpu-coolers/

Check out the 2017 OC competition here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrsN3r_gVJU

C-sharp when you cross the street… or you’re going to B-flat.

Mikke - PG Music