How healthy for your system is overclocking?

[merid]

I'm thinking about overclocking my system(when i get a new one) and am just curious as to how long my system will last at that overclocked state?

 

[Frank_M]

It will be way outdated and replaced before the effects of non-overstraining oc show.
However, the emphasis is on not overstraining your system.

 

[merid]

ok i'm going to say, will it last 4 years, because i'm a freshman in college and will not get to buy a new one till after i graduate. will it kill over befor that?

 

[waylander]

Anything can go in that four year time but I'd guess it will be either a hard drive or video card. Either are easy to replace at a fraction of the cost of the entire computer.

Even if you don't OC you can't guarantee that the system will not fail in 4 years. Make sure you take care of it, clean dust out regularly (at least once a month), make sure you use a surge protector, don't spill beer on it and don't use it as an extra seat when your friends are in your dorm room.

Make sure you get a case with good ventilation (don't cheap out on this), and a power supply that can handle your components.

 

[Pain]

ok i'm going to say, will it last 4 years, because i'm a freshman in college and will not get to buy a new one till after i graduate. will it kill over befor that?

If you need to make it last that long then you shouldn't mess with it, because it sounds like you can't afford to have a failure, so don't add any stress to the machine. Any decent machine out today will be able to run word, excell and all the apps you need to complete college for years to come. If you want to play games, get a console.

 

[dougie_boy]

ok i'm going to say, will it last 4 years, because i'm a freshman in college and will not get to buy a new one till after i graduate. will it kill over befor that?

ovverclocking will not just make your system die. heat is your main enemy. cooling cooling cooling.

be sensable with your OC and dont scrimp on the PSU and case. they are two of the componats which will have the biggest impact on noise and heat. budget atleast £150 for both.

 

[Pain]

Electromigration is one of the biggest causes of failure, which is exacerbated by heat and speed, but not caused entirely by those things alone. It will occur normally if you overclock or not.

The original poster needs to ask themselves if they can afford to replace all or part of the machine, or if it will cause undue financial hardship. If the answer is yes, it would create hardship, then they shouldn't do it, because the ends don't justify the means, not matter how little an OC is done.

 

[merid]

I"m planning on getting an opty 165 (what heatsink should i get that is cheap but good) and i already have a tsunami case(has a 120 fan in the front and back with a 80 on the side) with and ultra 600w PS (not modular) and a 160gig HDD. what would be a good ram/mobo/cpu/heatsink combo for overclocking it and making it last 4 years?
(its not that i cant afford to replace parts, its that i dont want to if i dont have to)

 

[Pain]

Thats cool, but I still think you need to understand that you can't even be sure a machine at stock speed will last 4 years, so asking someone to suggest items that will last overclocked for 4 years is unrealistic. There is no way to know how long the parts you receive will last, overclocked or stock.

Sounds like you need a probability study.

 

[merid]

well i've been trying to look at other people's computers and see how long they have lasted. my brother had one for almost 4 years befor his video card died, but that was because he didnt dust it out and the fan cought a piece of dust. all the other computers i've seen have not died (i still have an old hp from 97 that gets used almost every day.) i've never had a part die on me that wasnt dead from the maunfacture. I've built 5 or 6 systems for people over the last few years, and none of them have died or had parts go out. I treat my comptuers very good, i clean them out regularly, most of the time more than once a month. I'm all about buying quality so it will last. I know parts go bad, i hear about it all the time i myself have never had anything go bad.

 

[Guest]

Electromigration is one of the biggest causes of failure...

What the heck do you mean by electromigration? 8O

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

Meh, I'm in the college situation too. Sophomore. To be honest, I feel no need to overclock. I bought pretty high-end components, and even at a high resolution (1680 x 1050 FTW!!11) I can run any game/demo out at a steady smooth framerate with high detail levels.

FEAR and Prey put some very minor hurt on my system (FEAR at native with mostly medium settings, Prey at native with AA/AF off, sharpen specular off), but I can play BF2, Guild Wars, HL2, and when I install it at a constant 60 or higher FPS at maximum detail. My X-Fi lets me juice up the audio, but I think I need a better speaker system to take advantage of the EAX effects.

Once you see how fast everything runs with a new machine, I don't think you'll need or want to overclock - if you do, only for short periods of time. The only thing I've dabbled in overclocking with is the video card using coolbits - even then, not by much and then I don't keep the OC'ed settings after restart. Video card idles around 50C, after some BF2 gets up to about 61C.

If you really want to, make sure you cool everything well.

 

[Pain]

What the heck do you mean by electromigration? 8O

Google it. Basically it means electrons doing bad things.

Meh, I'm in the college situation too. Sophomore. To be honest, I feel no need to overclock.

Yeah, I guess what my possition is that if you need a machine for work or for school, don't mess with it. If it's not going to be used exclusively for gaming, then 9 out of 10 people aren't going to notice any speed difference between a mid level system and a top end system, for writing papers or researching on the web. If you can afford to have your machine go down for a day or week while you replace bad parts, then do what ever you want, but if you are in the middle of a term paper or research project, the last thing you need is to worry about your machine.

So, with that said, don't put any more pressure on the box. Leave it alone, you probably aren't going to notice it anyway.

 

[merid]

Well my system now is by no means a crappy system, but i'm selling it to get money to build a new one (i can get like 300 more than i paid for it out of it so)

 

[Korrd]

Well, as long as you have the system properly cooled, it should not degrade faster than normal.
I had my old Pentium MMX 166 working at 233 from 1996 to 2006 (yes, from 2002 to a week ago as second computer, its now "retired" replaced by a k6-2 500@600mhz), and it worked perfectly well. It even had passive cooling, with a massive heat spreader. The only cooler was the PSU one.

I now have my XP 3000 working at 2400Mhz instead of 2100, and the second rig is a K6-2 500 @ 600mhz. No problems found yet.

 

[Pain]

This is all very academic. "Shouldn’t". "Probably won’t". "In most cases". "As long as...". If I go into my boses and use those phrases, then he's proabably going to ask me what my backup/recovery plan is, so the original poster should ask the same question to himself.

 

[merid]

ok so here let me say this, the college i go to provides us a laptop, a very good one at that. i know i will always have one to use. i want a desktop for games and data storage. although i'm not worried about it crapping out on me and being without a comptuer. i can survive a while without being able to game, in fact i dont have aot of time during the year to game anyway.
could anyone give me an idea how much faster a opty 165 is than a 3500+

Edit: What i meant to say was that i dont want to have to buy another computer for at least 4 years until i have some real money and can blow it on a big system. but i would like to have a blazing fast system with out the cost lol i know kind of ironic but isnt that what overclocking is for? another quesiton, isnt a 185 opty just an overclocked 165?

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

another quesiton, isnt a 185 opty just an overclocked 165?

Actually, it's the opposite. A 165 is an underclocked 185, because that particular chip wasn't found to be perfectly stable at 185 speeds. Overclocking is a risk - that's why it voids your warranty!

I don't recommend overclocking a machine on which your work resides. Overclocking increases the wear and tear on your machine. And if something happens to your machine, regardless of whether or not you habitually backup like I do. AMD, eVGA, and Asus will flip you the bird when you try to claim your warranty. Not to mention the fact that you won't have a computer while you're trying to replace your parts - your productivity will be ZIP, and you'll be SOL.

If it's a dedicated gaming rig, by all means overclock the bejeezus out of it. Take that Opty up to 3.0 GHz and beyond. But your work is more important than gaming by factors of hundreds, at least.

Avoid overclocking until you can afford to put in the time and money to replace any broken parts as a result of your overclocking. When your life doesn't depend on your computer.

 

[merid]

A 165 is an underclocked 185

[code:1:65542930b3]Take that Opty up to 3.0 GHz and beyond.[/code:1:65542930b3]

so the stock cooler that comes with an opty will get me to 3.0? or does the 185 run cooler because the multplyer setting is differnt?

 

[Heyyou27]

Not the 165 anyways.

 

[merid]

then how does the 185 run with a stock cooler?

 

[Redline24]

Like they said, the 165 wasn't found stable at 185 speeds. Therefore, in order to get that 165 to 185 speeds, the voltage will need to be pumped up, resulting in more heat generated. The 165 is a "less perfect" 185, if you will, and therefore generates more heat at slower speeds than a rarer 185.

 

[MasterLee]

Overclocking isn't an unhealthy thing to do anymore. Unless you're a moron and you've read where Jimmie Joe got his CPU up to 4.8 GHz, with hardware that isn't even close to your's and you immediately crank it up to that.
Since overclocking utilities are standard anymore it is safe within reason.
Overclocking Rookies need not apply.

 

[RichPLS]

Dude, AMD bins parts, the 185 fortunately was manufactured better by chance than the 165, this is why you do not see lots of 165's at 3GHz...
I have an Opty 175 and primo other components combined with years of experience, and I can not get mine stable past 2.8GHz... and that is on water cooling...

Do you even own one so that you are speaking from personal experience?

 

[merid]

so what cooler should i get thats both cheap but good. and i hear that the optys will not be cut in price, so how well do the x2's overclock?am2?