# HTPC Overclocked.



## nova (Apr 30, 2006)

Just wondering if any of you with a HTPC overclock it? If so do you see any advantages?

How about 10k rpm HDD's? I would think that with the large media files a fast HDD would be more effective than overclocking.


----------



## khellandros66 (Jun 7, 2006)

I am postive that yes overclocking can benefit HTPC but only at times of heavy conversions from one format to another. Playback it typically enhanced by newer sound and video cards.

A 10,000 rpm HDD such as the WD Raptor comes in at a high $/MB and is not necessarily the most cost effective selection. If you are serious about storage size and speed SATA and P-ATA aren't your cup of tea. A newer SCSI Raid card with an external extensiton and a self contained HDD array case with its own power supply and cooling can be done and you could do up to 21 HDDs on three PCI card slots. At about 3-4TB and quickly reaching to $5,000-10,000+. Depending on brands, size and method of purchase etc.

HDDs are a huge bottleneck with the standard P-ATA reaching about 45-60MB/s depending on method of deployment (RAID/non-RAID) and even the SATA Raptors can do about 100-115MB/s in RAID-0 or Mirrored.

~Bob


----------



## Guest (Jan 23, 2007)

Do you _really_ need that fat a pipe for audio/video data? Surely even 40 Mb/s sustained data transfer is faster than a DVD drive, no? Or is there something I'm entirely missing?

I'm more familiar with digital audio workstations, so I guess I don't know what is actually needed for high quality video. I know that 40 Mb/s equates to a little over 50 simultaneous audio tracks at 24bits/96 kHz. That's a lot of data. So I'm curious myself about this.

The 10k drives are also going to introduce additional heat and noise, which may not be the greatest, and, unless you really need an incredibly high sustained transfer rate (as you might be more likely to if you were doing the postproduction on a Disney film or something, with a high audio track count in addition to high resolution video), it might be extra performance that you pay for, but never see the benefits of. The same can often be said of RAID, unless you need either some pretty extreme performance (striped) or extra data security (mirrored). Also, if you use RAID in a striped array for higher sustained data transfer rates, you run almost double the risk of data loss, because there is twice the chance for a drive to fail -- if one of the drives fails, you lose all the data on both. If you go for a mirrored RAID setup, you generally take a bit of a performance hit. It's hard to have the best of both worlds unless you go for a 4 disc RAID array, with two striped and two mirrored. That's a fairly major oversimplification of it, and I'm certainly not an expert in that particular area -- but I figured it would be worth adding to the conversation (maybe I'll learn something!). FWIW.

As to overclocking, I have heard of things like audio cards and other PCI cards acting up if the PCI bus gets increased by too much, but I don't know which ones, and I don't know if more recent cards are likely to be more tolerant of this kind of thing or not.

But you can run the risk of having various components not operating at their optimal levels of cooperation when you overclock, and that can mean unpredictable stability in your system.

That might not be such a huge deal in a gamer's situation, where half the point is running at the very bleeding edge all the time, but if you are talking about the main family TV/entertainment system, you may get some loud grumbles if your HTPC crashes in right in the middle of a crucial moment on Desperate Housewives or whatever.  And it'll probably take you longer than a commercial break to get it sorted again. 

It can also depend on the particular processor you have in your system. Certain CPUs are known to have plenty of headroom to be overclocked (and some are just underclocked versions of faster processors), while others are pretty close to the upper limits of their potential for speed.


----------

