I have my i5-3450 running stable at 3.87ghz right now and even at stock speeds, it's overkill for my needs. I just like to squeeze as much as possible out of my system. I use this in a gaming PC alongside a overclocked HD 7850. The thing is, in order for me to achieve an overclock past 3.7ghz on all cores, I had to bump the base clock/FSB up to 104.80mhz from 100.00mhz. If I literally go a bit higher, my GPU performs terribly and averages 30 FPS in every game regardless of detail setting signifying the PCIe port doesn't like the high base clock. So far, it's been 4 days and at the 104.80mhz base clock, everything has been running smooth. I've heard people say that a base clock higher than 100mhz on Sandy or Ivy Bridge CPU's can "damage" other components. What exactly do you mean here? 
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