Is overclocking safer than before?

beast · 24 Dec 2006 at 16:00

I ask as I'm always on about overclocking the conroe chips for free performance, But everyone I mention this to, be it the IT guys in work, or my brother (IT boffin) they always shake their heads and mumble about the time they fried a chip or some other horror story.
Yet on here (Alright, the title of the site does give the game away) it's just the done thing and I have yet to read a horror story. Have things changed, are the CPU's more resilient or something? Just interested really!

Logic Zero · 24 Dec 2006 at 16:18

Pretty much everyone on here overclocks, if you understand what you are doing then its free performance for typing in some numbers. So why not?

You'd have to do something really stupid to fry a chip these days

Jokester · 24 Dec 2006 at 16:22

Motherboards are more overclocker friendly these days, when it comes to CPUs there's no real need to do any physical mods unless you're going to be using exotic cooling.

Jokester

thefishdude · 24 Dec 2006 at 16:28

yep these days its a lot safer and easier. obviously the bigger the overclock the more risky it could be. but the conroes all like an overclock. i have never overclokced before untill this system but have plenty of mates that have. i spent ages researching parts to make it easier and ended up copying a rig that was used by a website in a review

and copied there overclock. its only a smalll one going from 2.67ghz to 3.3ghz but what i liked about it was there was no need to mess about with volt changes was just a fsb change and thats it. and there was a deffinate performance increase

.

Rroff · 24 Dec 2006 at 17:12

TBH a lot of people who work in IT don't really know very much about it - and those that do tend to lack any finesse - its not suprising they kill hardware with brute force overclocking...

In 10 years of overclocking I've so far only managed to actually kill anything once... even so if my brother was to talk about it I would try to dissuade him, especially as he lacks the knowledge to do it safely and I know how it feels to kill your hardware - tho I'm prolly being over protective

Fortunatly most of the (new to overclocking) people who come here seem to quickly appreciate their lack of experience and ask questions/learn before trying anything to complicated/dangerous, and there are some people here with very good experience to guide them - so thats a lot of why theres not too many horror stories.

james.miller · 24 Dec 2006 at 17:16

nothing has changed, not since the days of the thunderbirds and p3's at any rate. you'll still have enthusiasts who know what they're doing, and it tech *professionals* who will tell you its the work of the devil and you should never ever overclock for fear of death to you and all your family.

Rroff · 24 Dec 2006 at 17:18

james.miller said:
and it tech *professionals* who will tell you its the work of the devil and you should never ever overclock for fear of death to you and all your family.

dramatic but true

pegasus1 · 24 Dec 2006 at 18:05

james.miller said:
nothing has changed, not since the days of the thunderbirds and p3's at any rate. you'll still have enthusiasts who know what they're doing, and it tech *professionals* who will tell you its the work of the devil and you should never ever overclock for fear of death to you and all your family.

Cmon mate, these forums have changed in the last 3 years, OCing is far more mainstream than when i joined but at least the more experianced on here are now less up their own hoops.
When was the last time you used conductive paint on a laser cut bridge

Vegetarian · 25 Dec 2006 at 14:03

Ive overclocked for the last 7 years - none of the rigs I've built has ever died.

But most important rule of overclocking is do not push too far... be realistic.

One of my rules is never go faster than a top end chip... eg if I get an A64 3000 and fastest chip they do is 4000 at the time - keep it at 4000.

silversurfer · 25 Dec 2006 at 14:17

Dont rush, double check and dont bother messing about late at night. Generally try to avoid opening the case when the machine is still on, unfortunately I do that all the time

WJA96 · 25 Dec 2006 at 14:50

Rroff said:
dramatic but true

For good reason too. As a sysadmin or IT Manager you already have dozens/hundreds of issues per day to resolve just by users deleting files or stuffing their sandwiches into the optical drive trays so why would you want a user to overclock it. Of course no IT professional is going to allow a user to do anything and they even tend to not like updating drivers if they can help it. Business PCs should be basic and non-overclockable - like Dell's!

tuftyfella · 25 Dec 2006 at 15:42

Rroff said:
Fortunatly most of the (new to overclocking) people who come here seem to quickly appreciate their lack of experience and ask questions/learn before trying anything to complicated/dangerous, and there are some people here with very good experience to guide them - so thats a lot of why theres not too many horror stories.

thats quite true, ive asked questions and had great replies from people and its helped a lot, very greatful indeedy

oh and merry crimbo folks

celliott · 28 Dec 2006 at 02:59

You only fry a chip if you are not watching the temperatures properly or you are using ridiculous voltages. For high-end pc's its definatley worth the extra performance. Why pay another £50 for the next cpu up if you can overclock higher?

Nothing wrong with clocking late at night (Or in the morning

), I just squeezed another 130MHz off my 4000+ with cheapo ram.

Chris.

Tritium · 28 Dec 2006 at 12:25

I think most IT professionals do indeed encounter enough problems without having to worry about overclocking. However, most tend to be experts in networking and MS applications, and not hardware. I would be fairly certain that a large number of people on this forum know more about hardware and overclocking than the majority of IT professionals for this reason. It's just simply not a fair comparison, nor is it a good idea imo to ask an IT professional about overclocking. You may as well be asking a Formula One technician about Sony car radios - sure, both are linked back to cars but in reality they don't have much in common.

I think overclocking has become more accessible to the masses by motherboards which offer an array of BIOS options, frequency locks and voltage changes etc. I also think that due to the hot competition between manufacturers, more components get made to a single high standard before re-labelling as a cheaper model, as opposed to the older method of speed binning. For example, the E6300 and E6600 are actually not a fat lot different in their manufacturing and capabilities. It's just the E6300 has half of it's L2 cache disabled and uses a different multiplier.

Regardless of the reasons, overclocking is definitely a great way to attain free performance, and I will be continuing to do it in future

Markatomic · 28 Dec 2006 at 13:41

As a complete newcomer to ocing I simply approached it with caution, asked lots of questions , read and reread the available literature and then had a go.
I cant see any reason why without the huge amount of resources available you shouldnt try something like ocing.
I expect that at some point or another I will break something

but offset against the majority of times you get it right ...who cares.

Mark

james.miller · 28 Dec 2006 at 19:00

pegasus1 said:
Cmon mate, these forums have changed in the last 3 years, OCing is far more mainstream than when i joined but at least the more experianced on here are now less up their own hoops.
When was the last time you used conductive paint on a laser cut bridge

well, i *never* used it. but that doesnt really make much of a difference? I havent seen a change in trends since i started overclocking my p2-350. back then it may have been harder to get resulted, because of locked buses and things, but people were still doing it. Overclocking is more popular now because you get something for nothing, and people will always be interested in that. All it takes is for people to see the results and that's enough to want to try it

beast · 29 Dec 2006 at 03:37

Well it may be safe, but it's ruddy addictive

Got to 2700mhz on my e6600 before I hit a brick wall, it just wouldn't accept anything higher than 305fsb. A quick search reveals that the 965G chipset (the DS3 but with onboard graphics) is crap for overclocking

So I've bought a 965P board, purely for overclocking purposes. I wouldn't have dreamed I'd ever do this, but o/clocking is easy :cool:

Which is surprising to hear me say!!

pegasus1 · 29 Dec 2006 at 08:12

For me its more than just overclocking the individual components, its the whole build, from modding the case to installing WCing.

Captain Fizz · 29 Dec 2006 at 11:59

Tritium said:
...nor is it a good idea imo to ask an IT professional about overclocking. You may as well be asking a Formula One technician about Sony car radios - sure, both are linked back to cars but in reality they don't have much in common.

Indeed.
I was surprised at the lack of 'home PC' knowledge by... Um... Pretty much every hardware engineer I've met.
Out of everyone in my IT dept... Only I overclock.
(There was another, but he left a year ago)

IT Support does not mean home PC... In fact, when I first started, out of the 6 peeps in our team, only 2 had PC's at home!! :eek:

(Other than work laptops)

Overclocking is probably slightly less dangerous now that there are heatspreaders on every CPU these days. (I've never killed anything whilst overclocking for 5/6 years BTW)
That's more indirect though... More finger trouble that...

Actual overclocking has not really gotten any more or less likely to kill components IMHO...

weescott · 29 Dec 2006 at 13:31

Overclocking is only as safe as the spoon who does it!

/looks for mobo No 5.