4 ms·

I used to overclock a little, until I realized it's just killing the chip faster. These things are made to fail eventually but much later with stock clocks.

paulmd 9y ago
There are plenty of Sandy Bridge and FX processors that have been heavily OC'd since day 1 that are still ticking along five years later. If you have decent cooling and don't go too nuts on the voltage it's perfectly safe. And if your CPU dies after 5 years of hard labor do you really care all that much? FWIW I do agree with you though. I overclocked my 5820K to 4.13 GHz all-core, which is as far as it would go on stock voltages. According to the on-chip sensors I pull 90W during a normal (non-AVX) load. I could probably get another 400-500 MHz if I really pushed it, but getting the last 10% isn't worth turning that 90W processor into 200W+ for me. For scaredy-cats: I think that's a pretty reasonable approach to overclocking. Just go as far as you can at stock voltages. I bet pretty much any processor can overclock all its cores to max turbo speed with either no extra voltage or a very minor voltage increase.
- flamedoge 9y ago
  There's really one need that warrants overclocking -- gaming. I realize I need my processor for other things and not fail at it. I can sip coffee awhile longer while it finishes the job.
  - sergers 9y ago
    A hobby :) Use to be a frequenter of extremesystems.org 10-15 years ago, in the overclocking and water-cooling threads. Good fun. Now practicality wise, I had no use to OC really. Wasn't even a big gamer at the time. Pure fully fun and just seeing if I could (thought I was the cool kid running water-cooling, overclocked cpu/mem/you, installing every nightly patch in Gentoo portage with a tonne of system specific gcc and kernel flags lol). Now my thousands of dollars water-cooling parts, and a q6600 processor have been sitting in garage for 10 years. Use a standard i7 low-end laptop, no desktops in past 10 years
    - flamedoge 9y ago
      I still have q6600 too. was thinking of wiring up again as a home server (or compiler machine like urself?). Also got q8400, A8-3870K, and gaming laptop with i7-6700hq+gtx980m. needless to say, i don't oc laptop at all.
  - Yetanfou 9y ago
    Thousands of (former) Abit BP-6 owners want to have a word with you... remember that one? For those too young to remember, the BP-6 was a dual-socket motherboard which took two Celeron CPUs and allowed all sorts of overclocking trickery. Both the fact that you could run an SMP configuration using Celeron CPU's - something Intel had not foreseen nor intended - as well as the fact that it was possible to get most 300MHz (remember, this is a while ago) Celerons up to 450-466 MHz made it ideal as a cheap hobby server board. I still have one lying around, it still works and was in daily use (for mail, file and miscellaneous serving tasks) until a few years ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6
- joshjje 9y ago
  Definitely. I overclocked my 4930k to 4.5ghz all 6 cores, and up to 1.44-1.448v from 1.35v, using plain old air cooling. Thing has been on most days 24/7 for 4-5 years now.
Viper007Bond 9y ago
Presumably you'd replace the chip due to speed long before you'd ever hit its EOL. I overclocked my i7-4790k from 4.0 to 4.7 GHz just using the "easy" button in my ASUS software and called it a day. It's been humming happily along for 24/7 since the chip came out.
- flamedoge 9y ago
  mmm people with sandybridge still chugging along. I'd say pentium 4 is now near EOL. Core 2 is still pretty good. I'd say only big addition was AVX/AVX2 on sandybridge/haswell which gave us YMM registers.
  - Viper007Bond 9y ago
    What's the overlap though on someone who would aggressively overclock and someone who would still be running such a slow CPU?
ionised 9y ago
So your chip will last 5 years instead of 8 years. For some people (myself, gamers, hobbyists etc.) that doesn't matter.
sqeaky 9y ago
I have an old AMD bulldozer 8290 ro something liek that, the highest end one. Its stock clock speed it capped at 4.0Ghz. I have all 8 cores stuck at 4.7Ghz since I finished building it (It was a long and fun project and took several weeks of weekend tinkering). I started off using the machine for gaming and building C++. Now that machine is is part of Jenkins cluster running several VMs each building C++. This machine is about as stressed as a desktop CPU can be. I do not believe these are built to fail.

paulmd 9y ago

There are plenty of Sandy Bridge and FX processors that have been heavily OC'd since day 1 that are still ticking along five years later. If you have decent cooling and don't go too nuts on the voltage it's perfectly safe. And if your CPU dies after 5 years of hard labor do you really care all that much? FWIW I do agree with you though. I overclocked my 5820K to 4.13 GHz all-core, which is as far as it would go on stock voltages. According to the on-chip sensors I pull 90W during a normal (non-AVX) load. I could probably get another 400-500 MHz if I really pushed it, but getting the last 10% isn't worth turning that 90W processor into 200W+ for me. For scaredy-cats: I think that's a pretty reasonable approach to overclocking. Just go as far as you can at stock voltages. I bet pretty much any processor can overclock all its cores to max turbo speed with either no extra voltage or a very minor voltage increase.

flamedoge 9y ago
There's really one need that warrants overclocking -- gaming. I realize I need my processor for other things and not fail at it. I can sip coffee awhile longer while it finishes the job.
- sergers 9y ago
  A hobby :) Use to be a frequenter of extremesystems.org 10-15 years ago, in the overclocking and water-cooling threads. Good fun. Now practicality wise, I had no use to OC really. Wasn't even a big gamer at the time. Pure fully fun and just seeing if I could (thought I was the cool kid running water-cooling, overclocked cpu/mem/you, installing every nightly patch in Gentoo portage with a tonne of system specific gcc and kernel flags lol). Now my thousands of dollars water-cooling parts, and a q6600 processor have been sitting in garage for 10 years. Use a standard i7 low-end laptop, no desktops in past 10 years
  - flamedoge 9y ago
    I still have q6600 too. was thinking of wiring up again as a home server (or compiler machine like urself?). Also got q8400, A8-3870K, and gaming laptop with i7-6700hq+gtx980m. needless to say, i don't oc laptop at all.
- Yetanfou 9y ago
  Thousands of (former) Abit BP-6 owners want to have a word with you... remember that one? For those too young to remember, the BP-6 was a dual-socket motherboard which took two Celeron CPUs and allowed all sorts of overclocking trickery. Both the fact that you could run an SMP configuration using Celeron CPU's - something Intel had not foreseen nor intended - as well as the fact that it was possible to get most 300MHz (remember, this is a while ago) Celerons up to 450-466 MHz made it ideal as a cheap hobby server board. I still have one lying around, it still works and was in daily use (for mail, file and miscellaneous serving tasks) until a few years ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6
joshjje 9y ago
Definitely. I overclocked my 4930k to 4.5ghz all 6 cores, and up to 1.44-1.448v from 1.35v, using plain old air cooling. Thing has been on most days 24/7 for 4-5 years now.

Viper007Bond 9y ago

Presumably you'd replace the chip due to speed long before you'd ever hit its EOL. I overclocked my i7-4790k from 4.0 to 4.7 GHz just using the "easy" button in my ASUS software and called it a day. It's been humming happily along for 24/7 since the chip came out.

flamedoge 9y ago
mmm people with sandybridge still chugging along. I'd say pentium 4 is now near EOL. Core 2 is still pretty good. I'd say only big addition was AVX/AVX2 on sandybridge/haswell which gave us YMM registers.
- Viper007Bond 9y ago
  What's the overlap though on someone who would aggressively overclock and someone who would still be running such a slow CPU?

ionised 9y ago

So your chip will last 5 years instead of 8 years. For some people (myself, gamers, hobbyists etc.) that doesn't matter.

sqeaky 9y ago

I have an old AMD bulldozer 8290 ro something liek that, the highest end one. Its stock clock speed it capped at 4.0Ghz. I have all 8 cores stuck at 4.7Ghz since I finished building it (It was a long and fun project and took several weeks of weekend tinkering). I started off using the machine for gaming and building C++. Now that machine is is part of Jenkins cluster running several VMs each building C++. This machine is about as stressed as a desktop CPU can be. I do not believe these are built to fail.