ian_heath

Hi 2 all you gurus
What i want to know is what is the main factor restricting the overclocking of a cpu. Is it simply the heat generated by the device that makes it unstable or is it a lot of other factors?
I realise there may be a few but will a conversion to water cooling give me the best o/clock perforance increase?

cheers

Ian

1 g0t 0wn3d

It also depends on the quality of you motherboard, psu, and ram.

Rebellion88

Yes the main concern is the heat build up, although each processor has its own limit too much and it fry for obvious reasons. Pushing the processor beyond its capabilities can shorten the lifetime of the component. Good cooling will always aid overclocking, but for the majority of processors overclocking over 400mhz is when you really are pushing it IMO. Although i have seen AMD Athlon XP's 2600 barton cores OC'ed to match a 3200 if not a slight bit faster. Going higher will also require to increase the volts going through making sure its getting enough power to juice the performance.

JP198780

before the cpu or anything can burn up, u will get a BSOD, then shutdown

linderman

thats not really accurate, I have seen many CPU's that were actually burnt / toast right after the BSOD

and I have seen many CPU's that were trashed that wernt crashing, but werent stable either. Thats why the Prime 95 torture test

its VERY possible to get an overclock setting that will not crash / BSOD but its wont pass prime 95

Many fellas think if they can game for 2 or 3 hours without crashing then they have achieved a stable and dependable overclock setting, NOT TRUE

those are the fellas that burn up the most!

they just dont have settings quite hot enough to BSOD


heat is a major factor,

to get a good overclocker you need a perfect marriage of many components, much like a super bowl football team.

You need an overcloclocking friendly motherboard, you need a cpu that likes to overclock (like the intel C2D's >>>>> the AMD's dont really overclock well any more, they just dont have the headroom left after their labeled speed)
You need memory that supports tight timings, you need good cooling >>>> watercooling is the best, however for the cost vs gain air cooling is a better option

watercooling is expensive for a good set-up (see Danger den) like $250.00 to $300.00 and you will be able to lower cpu temps about 10C maybe a tweak more but 10C of heat reduction is a decent improvement!

linderman

Ian:

check your PM's