How harmful is it to overclock your CPU?

Sim_One

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My old PII 400mhz can be overclocked to a 466 or maybe even a 500. So how harmful is that? Will the CPU die in a few weeks?
 
I ran a 400 Celeron at 500 for severall years. I invested in a good heatsink and fan first though.
 
Wasn't that with nitrogen ice or something?
 
Just buy a high powered cooling fan ;)
 
That's probably where the nitrogen ice came into play...
 
My computer has so many fans it sounds like an aircraft at take-off when I switch on!
 
Most CPUs are actually set up to run at a slower speed than they can "safely" run. You can therefore basically overslock any CPU by a small amount with few problems; heat is the main one, and a new fan / heat sink is a good idea. There are numerous websites and newsgroups dedicated to how to do it, so I suggest you have a look at those. It is actually fairly straight-forward (install new fan and heat sink, change a few jumpers around).

However, with the cheap price of CPUs, why not just buy a new one?
 
I found that when I changed graphics card, my computer ran slower on benchmarks when overclocked! I think it was the graphics data diditn synchronise properly once I changed the fsb speed. Now I run my 800 Pentium 3 at 800 it gives me the fastest benchmarks.

Its worth checking what makes a difference to your system. More memory speeded mine up more than anything else.
 
My first overclocked system was my 466MHz Celeron @ 583MHz. After a while it melted the northbridge chip on my motherboard. After getting a brand new mobo, it ran @ 525 until I sold it. Then I bought 600MHz AMD Duron, had my friend make overvoltage mod on my new motherboard. This CPU ran most of the time @ 1GHz with voltage as high as 2,00V. All I had with this was a basic heatsink with extra case cooling. Now I have a cheap 1,6 P4 chip @ 2,15GHz with retail heatsink.

Heat is not a big problem until you start raising the voltage what you must eventually do, if you want to overclock more than few MHz. Also you should remember that whenever upping the fsb, the chipset also generates more heat.

The risk of something going wrong/broken is always there, but my experiences with overclocking so far have been positive. I intentionally invest on the slowest(cheapest) model of a certain CPU type knowing full well I can overclock it to speeds I can't afford.

Overclockin isn't necessarily harmful for the CPU itself. My brother managed to break his harddisk losing all data on it while trying out too high 83MHz fsb. And as I mentioned in one of my examples, my deceased motherboard melted it's norhbridge.

Sorry for my poor english.
 
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