Is it dangerous to OC?

[Wayken]

I just built my first gaming rig and I'm looking for a little advice.

My question is whether overclocking degrades your CPU or not. I'm also curious which would be safer, leaving my CPU overclocked 24/7 or only during gaming sessions.

I also have the same questions for my GPU.

CPU: i5 3570k
GPU: GTX 680

I would really appreciate any feedback! Thanks in advance!

 

[neon neophyte]

does it degrade the cpu faster? sure, it must
is it dangerous? it can be

if you know what you are doing before you do it, its not dangerous. does less cpu life really matter? well, ive overclocked everything forever and ive never seen a cpu die from being worn out. it just really isnt a factor imo.

 

[$hawn]

A general decent OC to around 4.2GHz on that i5 is not going to harm it in any way, provided you give it adequate air cooling and be careful with the voltages you supply it with. Today's chips can take a hell lotta abuse The chip may fail after 7-8 years instead of the normal 15yrs whatever, but by that time your system will be beyond obsolete anyway!!

Most of the times its the crazy OC's, like the extremely overvolted 5.5GHz+ ones that kill chips....but i have never heard of any mordern CPU dying due to OC'ing in recent times

Better read some guide to OC before jumping into it. Should be pretty easy, but do it carefully.
All the best

 

[Wayken]

When you overclock your cpu, does it permanently stay at that clock speed? or are you just setting a "limit" for your cpu? Like if I overclocked my cpu to 4.5GHz, does it constantly run at 4.5GHz, or does it, I guess, set a "limit" of 4.5GHz on my cpu so it doesn't try to go any higher?
I'm very new to overclocking.. xD

 

[pjmelect]

The life of a CPU is definitely degraded by overclocking but I think that this has more to do with the temperature that the CPU is running at. Overclocking causes hot spots on the CPU die making it more important to keep the temperature low. When I overclock I use a rule of thumb of not letting the CPU temperature go over 60C under worst case conditions such as maximum load and maximum ambient temperature. GPU's are designed to run hotter but as a rule of thumb don't let these go over 80C. If you stick to this you should have no problems and the life of your computer should not be significantly degraded.
The life of a modern CPU is about 7 years running 24/7 so you computer will be obsolete before it fails, but this life rapidly decreases with rising temperatures. Providing your temperatures are low you can leave the overclocking on 24/7.

 

[neon neophyte]

When you overclock your cpu, does it permanently stay at that clock speed? or are you just setting a "limit" for your cpu? Like if I overclocked my cpu to 4.5GHz, does it constantly run at 4.5GHz, or does it, I guess, set a "limit" of 4.5GHz on my cpu so it doesn't try to go any higher?
I'm very new to overclocking.. xD

you can do it either way. my cpu downclocks to 1.6ghz when not being heavily used and clocks up to 4.9 when being stressed. i have been running it this way for 2 years now without problem. on 24/7

 

[Wayken]

Ahhh, I see. I'll give it a mild overclock and work with that. I appreciate the response!

 

[jaguarskx]

Overclocking is not dangerous as long as you are not reckless. It's best to overclock in small increments like 100MHz at a time and only increasing voltage slightly when the PC becomes unstable. Never use the stock cooler when overclocking. Always get a good cooler like the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO which is relatively inexpensive and cools pretty well. While it's been around for a long time I use Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste. IC Diamonds is also very, very good, but also more expensive.

My Q9450 has a slight OC of 3.0GHz (from 2.6Hz) for the past 3 years and it is still going strong. It will likely get replaced by Haswell next year, but the Q9450 will still live on in my HTPC (which currently has a C2D E6600).

 

[neon neophyte]

i ran my 2.66ghz core2duo at 3.7ghz for 4 years. never had any problems. it didnt burn out, it retired

 

[Wayken]

Thank you all for the responses!
They've made me much more comfortable in my decision to overclock.

 

[DuncanJ ones]

Hello Friends,

If you really do tuning of all packages by disabling at compile time unnecessary functionality or you have some specific clone of x86 processor that requires some specific optimizations from compiler then your system will run even faster than the same system installed from a binary distro. As for degradation of the hard drive - you may use a separate volume to keep all your intermediate files of such rebuilds that you just format each time the update completed. The another option is to perform all this building on a tmpfs device that is actually backed up by the memory and swap files/devices, so its content anyway cleared on each restart of the system.

Thanks And Regards
Duncan Jones