For those who don't know, Hardware.info is a well-respected mainly Dutch portal which writes (and talks) about pretty much everything technology related. They are also the home of the Hardware.info Pro OC which is currently ranked 6th in the Pro OC League. Very recently Hardware.info published an interesting scaling article investigating the effect of CPU, GPU and Memory overclock on the most relevant benchmarks included in our benchmark suite.

For most overclockers familiar with the benchmarks the results will not be very surprising, although sometimes there are a couple of interesting findings. For example, 3DMark Ice Storm scales 3x better with CPU overclocking than XTU. 3DMark05 and 3DMark06 scale very similar with CPU frequency as for example Wprime and Cinebench, despite being a 3D benchmark.

For memory overclockers there's not that much to gain in terms of raw performance. Apart from XTU, which scales up to 14% going from DDR3-1600C9 to DDR3-2400C9, only SuperPI 32M and 3DMark11 scale a bit. The differences are even smaller when considering tuning the memory timings. The difference is not larger than 2%. That may seem insignificant, but note that an increase of 1.2% in 3DMark05 would push Steponz (#3 - 73835) over TeamAU (#2 - 74192) with about 74700 points. In other words, just like in any other sport that last little bit matters.

As for GPU overclocking it comes to no surprise that Fire Strike Extreme is one of the most intensive 3D benchmarks. The new Fire Strike Ultra is probably even more intensive, but was not included in the tests. Possibly because it was only released last week.

For more information, check out the article at Hardware.info.