I had my first overclocking experience with my brand new Pentium 75 back then in the days when this was considered a fast cpu. A friend of mine actually introduced me to it to and we managed to make the
computer a little bit faster that way. After that I never looked back and never tried to overclock again, rumors of reduced component life time and instablity kept me away. I also had no need to overclock the
PC just to get a few percent in speed, figured it was not worth it.
Overclocking has changed over time though and it seems that the change is drastic when you look at video cards for instance. You can buy overclocked video cards right from the manufacturer and even the standard tools from Nvidia and Ati make it possible to overclock the GPU.
It’s only natural that the overclocking scene created tools to check if the changes were causing any instabilities on their system and that’s where OverClock Checking Tool [
OCCT, via
Neowin] comes into play. The startup window is displaying all kinds of information about your computer that are relevant to overclockers, e.g. voltages or cpu and bus clock settings.
The main purpose of OCCT is to check the two core components CPU and RAM with the option to check one or both of the components. The default test lasts for an hour but there is the possibility to raise that to two hours or let it run until you hit the OFF button.
Results are saved as graphs in graphics which is great because you will have access to them even if you close the tool.
OverClock Checking Tool