Is overclocking safer than before?

Logic Zero said:
You'd have to do something really stupid to fry a chip these days
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I encouraged my mate just before Christmas to overclock his AMD system and he killed it. Felt well guilty. He found a forum where someone posted the exact configurations of what they did with the BIOS (they had the same motherboard and CPU) and he entered in all the details and when he saved the BIOS settings and it reset, not even the intial BIOS check screen came up!!

Does anyone know if this is an irretrievable situation?!?

He knew the risks he was taking but it goes to show what can go wrong!!
 
He should edged his way upto those settings instead of diving in at the deep end.

People on forums are always making it out its easy to get 5ghz or whatever, later on you find they've fried two motherboards on the way there and are using triple phase change cooling to stop it happening again.

Find your own limits, apart from anything hardware can still vary in its tolerances
 
silversurfer said:
He should edged his way upto those settings instead of diving in at the deep end.

People on forums are always making it out its easy to get 5ghz or whatever, later on you find they've fried two motherboards on the way there and are using triple phase change cooling to stop it happening again.

Find your own limits, apart from anything hardware can still vary in its tolerances
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So true.
No two Mobo's are ever the same, even if they are the same model and spec, that goes for CPU's and memory for that matter
 
the satisfaction i got from learning on an xp3000 was immense. the same day i fitted a new 4400+ i just had to clock it to see *** it would do.... rude not too!

i must say though at the back of my mind i always think "if i fry this the missus will kill me!.... but i'll lie and get a c2d"!! :D
 
As above, clear the CMOS usually fixes things. Also, I have found (bizzarely, and somewhat unbelievably :/ ) that turning the thing off for a while can sometimes help. Particularly when I've been hitting restart a lot, I suppose it gives the capacitors time to relax.

Overclocking is totally safe. I was just at my mates house building his comp. He wasn't very happy with the thought of overclocking, due to the nonsense his brothers had told him about "frying" the computer. Still wouldn't let me do anything to it :(
 
ohhhhh.
''the people who work in IT ''

i hate that. lol most of the time im asked to sort out IT problems and told i should get a job in IT because i build and overclock computers. but really IT has nothing to do with computers... really... does it.

most IT people would believe that overclocking is highly dangerous and offers no bennefits and bla bla bla... ive heard it time and time again. one person even told me that you should NEVER use stress test programs to stress your CPU... you may break it. 10 minutes at the most. when we would consider a 24 hour torture test necessary.

i havnt been on the scene long enough to know ( like the OLD school stuff) but i imagine that because tis gotten easier, its also got safer.

Rick
 
R B CUSTOMS said:
ohhhhh.
''the people who work in IT ''

i hate that. lol most of the time im asked to sort out IT problems and told i should get a job in IT because i build and overclock computers. but really IT has nothing to do with computers... really... does it.
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Very perceptive. I "work in IT". I sell databases to businesses in the meat industry, but the computers and software are incidental to the systems analysis, implementation and training which is what triples or quadruples the cost of the installation. On a £250,000 contract, the servers and infrastructure to run it on are almost incidental costs. In fact, we quite often throw them in as freebies depending on how hard the customer puts up a fight in the negotiations. And the businesses I sell to wouldn't touch me with a bargepole if I hadn't worked in the meat industry for 15 years. I know their problems so I can sell solutions. It has nothing to do with IT and everything to do with business efficiency.
 
Overclocking isn't dangerous :D besides where not really overclocking imo, where just running the chips at there maximum potential. Both company's could have much higher retail clocks with their latest chips, but there's no point as they can make more money by releasing a 'new faster' chip every few months.
 
Do you reckon, using the conroe E6600 chip as an example, that the thought process from Intel, is as follows...

We've created this powerful, efficient chip, it can run at 3gig no problems, but even at 2400mhz it wipes the floor with the competition. so We'll sell it at that speed, and we can keep increasing the speed up to and beyond 3gig over the following year to keep people buying.

Is that the way it is, or am I being cynical?!

Without a doubt, why give anything more than you have too? You also want to keep the competition guessing, if AMD was to rush out something that could take on Conroe at its current speeds, Intel could sit back and just ramp up the clock speeds on its current range.
 
Without a doubt, why give anything more than you have too when you can milk plenty of profit out of the market? You also want to keep the competition guessing, if AMD was to rush out something that could take on Conroe at its current speeds, Intel could sit back and just ramp up the clock speeds on its current range.
 
It's probably 2 fold.
People will show you their good results, and won't bother with the failed attempts/dead hardware/crap clocks. So you really only ever see the "good" points. That could be why there's very few horror stories floating about.
Don't think overclocking is any safer than it ever was. It's been made easier, but the "dangers" of pushing things beyond their rated speeds are still the same.
These have been lessened with better quality components etc, but the same dangers from heat/voltage/user error are still there like they always were.

Overclocking is now mainstream. It's not limited to the hardcore few. There's enough knowledge in places like this to make it safe for even newcomers to dabble in.
At the cutting edge, with vmods, extreme cooling etc its still dangerous as the hardwares run to the ragged edge. For the everyday joe there's no real danger as pretty much EVERYONE will tell you to keep temps below 55 deg and voltages lower than x.
 
I think overclocking only accounts for 5% of the market, based on things like motherboard sales for example which would be an essential component to any overclocker really.
Thats not to say ocuk isnt one of the top retailers, I just dont think every single customer actually overclocks their gear.

Of course, overclocking is built into graphics drivers now, thats pretty safe and mainstream I guess :) Asus do that 10% auto overclock thing as well, its just you wont ever find something like down pcworld - they only sell ecs mobo
 
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