Why do gpu's crash when you oc them

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Nov 30, 2015
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Hi, so im sort of a noob to overclocking so please excuse my ignorance.
anyways my question is do gpu's crash after oc'ing because of high temps or because they just cant run at a higher freq.
im asking this because im thinking to get a AIO cooler for my gtx 970 and i want to push it to its max. So far i oc'ed it by 40mhz on the core clock and 300 on the mem.
Anyway thans for any answers ^.^
 
Solution
The same reason anything crashes when oced too high. You are running above what they designed it for and that could cause a power issue, computational error, or any of the other many issues.