Overclocking my PC for more performance

I recently upgraded the SSD in my PC to a Samsung 2TB 970 EVO plus NVMe M.2 (Just rolls off the tongue 😝). I needed more SSD capacity for when I use my flight simulator (X-Plane 11) with the ORBX True Earth scenery, it takes a huge amount of space and I often removed the Great Britain Central scenery pack for the Great Britain South scenery pack which was a bit of a pain as I fly from an airport that's almost on the border.

Anyhow, whenever I change an expensive part in a computer that's not the latest and greatest it raises the question am I ready for a new PC or some other upgrades to go with it. After almost spending an obscene amount of money on a new rig I decided that other than the flight sim this computer does everything I need and is pretty fast (it's also not my main work rig, that's an M1 MBP Max). But the sim needs more speed. I decided to look into overclocking.

After some reading I discovered the CPU I had (i5-8600K) was a very capable CPU when it came to overclocking and with my motherboard it made it simple using some pre-set options for my CPU. I went straight for the max (note this was for my CPU not the max available) and run the recommended Intel Burn Test.

My first test failed, that was because I went for 4.6 GHz from a CPU that was previously running at 3.6 GHz. I dropped it down to 4.5 GHz and ran the test again which succeeded.

Intel Burn Test maxing out my CPU to stress test it.

The test essentially puts the CPU under max load and I mean max, even taking the screenshot was a struggle as it was under so much stress. You can see from the screenshot below though, I was maxing out at 4.48 GHz on a CPU sold as a 3.6 GHz chip. That's a 24% increase in performance and I can totally tell. It's snappy and I can really feel the difference across everything I do on this machine.

I wouldn't recommend you do the same unless you are pretty sure you know what you are doing and what settings are being changed. I have intentionally not made this an how to guide as I really don't want to be responsible if you end up burning your CPU to a crisp. If you do fancy doing it though, the gains are pretty significant and worth it.