ISOOC stands for Industry Standards Organization for Overclocking

Mission Statement

Our mission is to promote and support a long-term, sustainable, and prospering PC overclocking and PC DIY ecosystem by uniting all relevant stakeholders and promoting industry standards for relevant features and functions.

Today’s PC Enthusiast Challenge

Two key industry trends are at the root of today’s PC enthusiast’s main challenges:

  1. The deep technological integration going from chip to system-on-chip results in a fundamental shift for overclocking enablement. Whereas in the past overclocking could be enabled and supported by independent third-party development, nowadays silicon vendors must dedicate development resources to build toolkits that enable performance tuning.
  2. Over the past decade, the relative share of PC DIY within the greater compute market has decreased significantly with the rise of competing form factors and shift in mainstream user compute needs. Whereas at the beginning of the millennium everyone had a desktop PC for their compute needs, nowadays people can choose from a variety of form factors including notebook, tablet, phone, cloud, etc. As a result, relatively fewer resources are available for innovation and development for the PC DIY segment which includes performance tuning functions.

The paradox created by on the one hand needing more resources to enable overclocking and on the other hand fewer available resources result in specific quality of life challenges for today’s PC enthusiast. Here are some examples:

  • Lack of troubleshooting information: if the system does not boot, in most cases the end-user cannot try to diagnose the system due to lack easy access to system information (e.g. debug LED only on high-end motherboards; no 3rd party debug cards for eSPI)
  • Restricted or poorly enabled performance tuning toolsets (e.g. artificial clock limits on processors and graphics cards)
  • There are few open standards for enthusiast-grade hardware. This causes confusion and uncertainty about compatibility (e.g. DRAM heatsink thickness conflicts with VRM thermal; typical AIO requires multiple cables to motherboard)
  • Innovative tools developed for the PC DIY overclocker are often short-lived due to the limited sales volume (e.g. external overclocking tools developed are in limited supply, don’t make it to retail market, or are end of life soon after launch)
  • Lack of stress-test standards for assessing overclocking stability outside Operating System (e.g. customers risk their daily operating system to assess system stability

Unique Value Proposition

Following the mission statement, ISOOC aims to develop user-centric industry standards for PC enthusiasts that benefit all stakeholders.

Target Segments

ISOOC identifies the following market segments as key beneficiaries from the open standards developed:

  • PC DIY enthusiast & overclockers
  • PC Builders and System Integrators
  • Remote management of overclocked high-performance compute (HPC, HFT, EDA)
  • OS-agnostic performance tuning