June 15th 2009 11:47 pm
Is it safe to overclock a CPU or a graphic card?
There is a constant misconception that overclock is unsafe. The fact? I give it a yes and no. Yes it is unsafe if you do it in extreme, like over heat and over volt for a long period. It is safe as long as you stay within the limit of your hardware. Safe or not, there are people out there willing to do insanely high overclock like the one here.
One thing non-overclockers were right – overclock lessens the lifespan of hardware. True, but how much it lessen? I’ve got my Galaxy 7300GT DDR3 overclocked to 700MHz (500MHz default) core speed and 1640MHz (1400MHz default) memory frequency for a healthy 3 years and it’s still alive and kicking. And then, it’s about time to upgrade, it isn’t fast enough for all the latest games anymore. So, you get the idea here, your hardware obsolete a lot faster than it dies.
Hardware manufacturers are even making their chips to be overclocking friendly to win market share. Take the Intel Core 2 Duo example, enthusiasts favour these processors over those from AMD as they can overclocked better, but more importantly they performed faster clock for clock. Even overclocking are made as a feature into hardware these days. Nahalem Core i7, the new King of CPU with triple channel memory support, has a feature called Turbo Boost. It automatically overclocks on one core of the processor when the processor is below operating power and TDP limits; example – when you run a single thread application like SUPER PI.
An example of a safe overclock would be the budget 65nm Athlon X2 dual core processors from AMD and Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors overclocked to 3.0GHz. It was perfectly safe as many enthusiasts tested them with hours of stress test on these processors at 3.0GHz or more. Even better was, you don’t have to raise any voltage to the processor at 3.0GHz at all. Raising voltage is a way to stabilize the hardware in overclocked mode. If you managed to overclock a 65nm Ahtlon X2 or Intel Core 2 Duo to 3.2GHz or more without raising the core voltage, congrats as you got yourself a very good quality processor, finding these processors will be like searching a needle in a haystack.
CPUZ showing my overclocked AMD Athlon 64 x2 5200 at 3.0GHz,default was 2.7GHz.
As you can see above, I only raised the bus speed to 223MHz from the default 200MHz. The CPU speed can be calculated with this formula: CPU Multiplier X Bus speed = CPU Frequency In this case, my CPU Multiplier is 13.5 and my Bus speed is 223MHz, so the formula would be 13.5 X 223MHz = 3010MHz. More detail of overclock will be shown in upcoming article where I will talk about the hardware needed, steps in making sure a safe overclock, and how to make sure your overclock is stable.
The advantage? Well, I’ll describe in point form below for better clarification:
- Safe money, you get Extreme edition-like performance at the cost of a budget processor.
- Free performance boost at zero cost.
- The money can be use to purchase a bigger monitor or a faster graphic card or maybe a 2TB hard drive.
As for the disadvantage. None. Unless you do an insanely high overclocking with extreme temperature without proper cooling method.
1 Comment »
How I Make $300 a Day Online on 18 Jun 2009 at 12:25 am #
Hey, nice post, very well written. You should post more about this.