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JAFisher44 said:
Well, fire hazards aside, The reason I would never OC a chip is because it is bad for it. Period. No matter how well cooled the chip is OCing will reduce its life expectancy. Chips are built to run at certain speeds. The process of heating and cooling causes the silicon in the chip to expand and contract. The materials used are rated to do this at a certain speed. If you overclock (even with proper cooling) this will occur more often and to a greater degree and will degrade the chip. This means that the chip will fail sooner than it would at its rated speed, often far sooner. This is why you should not do it.
Not to mention the fact that overclocking your chip is a guarenteed recipie for failure if your cooling system ever hiccups. Sure, overclocking is fun if you can afford to buy a new system every year, or buy multiple chips, if necessary, when things go wrong, but for your average working joe, you would be best served to just use it at rated specs.
If you do insist on overclocking you should go with a Pentium chip, as they seem to tollerate it better, relatively, than AMD chips. However this means that you have to use a Pentium chip (not good if you want a gaming machine). I would also recommend dropping a some cash on a good liquid cooling system as well.
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Your first statement is partially true. But it’s not the increase in frequency that causes it. The additional Vcore accelerates electron migration, which is what ages the chip. Heat cycles don’t come into play, and of themselves are not large enough to adversely affect the chip. So my chip last seven years of 24/7 instead of 12, I really don’t care.
Your second statement is false. Chips are hardwired to run at certain speeds. They are designed to run in a target spectrum of speeds. The speeds are determined by binning each lot, then burning to fit inventory needs. If you get a P4 woody of 2.4GHz and another of 1.8GHz, and they have the same lot # on the core, they are the same chip. One had the multiplier burned to 19 and the other was burned to 18. Other than that, they are the same chip.
Your third statement is not true; the materials seldom change within a family of chips. One P4 woody is the same as any other P4 woody material wise. More often than not, it is manufacturing advances that change not the materials.
Your fifth statement is a repeat, but it is still untrue. Electron migration is the problem, and it is caused by voltage. Older processors could be killed by heat, but it took excessive amounts, far beyond what a stable system would run at. Newer chips have built in thermal protection.
Your sixth statement is untrue. If the cooler fails, the thermal protection will shut down the system. More likely, the system would gradually overheat, causing the OC to become unstable, and cause data corruption which would eventually crash the system.
Your seventh statement is sort of a generalization, and a mater of personal opinion. What people can afford is none of my business so long as they manage to pay the bill. Some people OC just to push the state of the art. Others do it because they can’t afford top end hardware to run new games with; others do it because they enjoy it. Who are you to say what would be best for them?
Your last statement is pure uninformed bull****. While Intel systems still hold the reputation of being the most stable, the only place they exceed AMD on OC’ing is raw FSB and cold start on chilled systems. You can not alter the multiplier on an Intel chip, and if you push the Vcore more than a couple of tenths, you’ll be flirting with sudden P4 death. Push it to 1.8v and you can measure the life in hours. AMD chips thrive at 1.8 and on most of them, you can alter the multiplier. Also AMD offers a chip just for the OC’ing crowd. The FX comes with an unlocked multiplier. Also, AMD chips tend to cost less, so it hurts less when you kill one. So, if you want to do serious OC’ing, you are more or less forced to use AMD. Also, 90+% of OC’d computers are cooled with air. Water cooling is for the hard core guys, and phase change is almost a novelty. I probably know 400peeps who OC. Very few, less than 20, use anything other than air for cooling. Perhaps 15 use water and there are five of us with phase change systems. AFAIK, I’m the only one still messing with pelts. The average OC of the people I know is probably 100MHz on the FSB. These systems run for years like this with no problem.