To Overclock or Not to Overclock?

[Nikolai]

Hi Guys,
Ive been reading a lot about people overcloking the Q6600 processor and people getting great results (value for money results) .... i saw the Capper even did a test on photoshop for the speed and saw it improved speed about 25% from 2.4ghz to 3.0ghz and speed increase again to 3.49ghz
I guess your all influencing me to have a bit of courage and go beyond what the box tells me to do ....

photoshop and flash are programs i use a lot with quite large file sizes ....

Here are some of my questions/concerns about overclocking..

* Even with sufficient cooling, will it reduce the longevity of the processor, if so by how much ? and will it affect other parts in the computer ....

* What is a safe level of overclocking for the Q6600, should a balance be achieved and i just settle at 3.0ghz getting the G0 stepping version and then add on a cooler like the Zalman CNPS9700 LED ?

I guess id like to overclock but have piece of mind at the same time that im not degrading the longevity of my computer for short term gain .....

thanks very much for your opinions!

[Jokerswild]

Originally Posted by Nikolai

Hi Guys,Here are some of my questions/concerns about overclocking..

* Even with sufficient cooling, will it reduce the longevity of the processor, if so by how much ? and will it affect other parts in the computer ....

* What is a safe level of overclocking for the Q6600, should a balance be achieved and i just settle at 3.0ghz getting the G0 stepping version and then add on a cooler like the Zalman CNPS9700 LED ?

Overclocking will cause more heat which reduces the lifespan of the processor but not to a great degree as long as you don't go overboard. How much it's reduced depends on how far you want to push the overclock. A moderate overclock should not decrease the lifespan of your processor by enough to make a difference.

The safe level of overclocking will depend on your Q6600 since every processor will overclock different. A good after market cooler is a good idea.

[Quakindude]

I agree with Joker. Up until a natural disaster with my home in March of this year, I still had an old Celeron 400 that was overclocked to 640Mhz running as a server box. That's greater than a 50% overclock and it ran that way for over 5 years. In parents house for 3 of those years no less. Where they never cleaned that sucker out.

If you go into it thinking that you'll only take it to 3.0Ghz, and you may not need much of a voltage boost to get it there, you can run that CPU for years like that without sacrificing much, if any, life span. Just keep the voltage and temps under the Intel spec and the overclocked CPU should last the normal life of the CPU. Nothing is guranteed though, so do so at your own risk, but my Q6600 will be sitting at 3.0Ghz, if not higher, for long term use.

[One4yu2c]

The topic of 'lifespan' comes up every so often, and the concept is really overblown. Barring any defects, the lifetime of these chips far exceed the lifetime of any system they're going in, but let's look at a few specific areas:

Heat
Keeping in mind how long these are supposed to last, heat should only be a concern when you're approaching or have breached the CPU's thermal specification. Running a little bit hotter than usual isn't a stamp of doom on your processor. Otherwise, we could say that those living in the year-round warm environment of Vegas (like site owner Rich Caporali) can expect a shorter CPU life expectancy than those living in the nearly year-round chilly environment of Michigan (like myself). Or that using the stock cooler decreases the CPU lifespan over using a better cooling third party cooler.

On a related note, it's actually very difficult (not impossible) to kill a processor with today's built-in safeguards. And on your part, if you're conservative with any voltage bumps and verify that temperatures are within the manufacturer's specification, you can expect that processor to last a long time, overclocked or otherwise.

Processor Speed
One also has to keep in mind that a lower priced processor could potentially be a higher priced (and higher clocked) CPU in disguise. For example, any given Q6600 may be capable of running faster than 2.4GHz, but may have been set at the slower speed to meet a market demand. A good example of this is looking back to the AMD Barton days. Everybody's favorite chip back then was the 2500+, because many of them were frontside bus gimped 3000+ processors. OC the 333MHz fsb to 400MHz, and you just turned your 2500+ into a 3000+. Did doing so theoretically decrease the lifespan? Perhaps, in some minute amount, but that would also be like saying that the lifespan on 3000+ processors was/is shorter than 2500+ chips. In theory, that could be true, but in practice, you'll never keep a system long enough to find out.

Risks
Of course, overclocking is never risk free, and your warranty technically goes out the window as soon as you push a part beyond its shipped spec. With the proper precautions, you can have an extremely safe OC, but as a rule of thumb, to err on the side of caution never overclock a component you can't afford to replace.

Associated Risks
Overclocking your processor can OC other parts of your system as well, specifically your RAM. When you increase your system's frontside bus, you're push both components. This is where dividers come in, in which you can tell your RAM and processor to de-sync from each other. This can get complicated without an understanding of how PCs work, but for a quick example, you can tell your RAM to run 2MHz for 3MHz on the frontside bus, otherwise called a 3:2 ratio (your RAM will run at .667 times the the fsb).

Today's motherboards do a great job with automatically setting the appropriate divider, but we still recommend learning the 'hows' and 'whys' and then manually applying your own tweaks for optimal performance.

[Nikolai]

Thanks so much for all that information, its makes a lot of sense and is very helpful ....

What alterations would i need to make to my Crucial Ballistix Tracer Ram (4x1gb) for it to handle my overclocking the Q6600 to 3ghz .... do you think the rig im building (as you see in my signature below) could handle pushing the Q6600 to 3ghz, while minimally compramising the rigs lifespan ?

Also what is the best way you have seen the Q6600 be bumped up to 3ghz?

[Capper]

I think 3GHz is a fairly easy achievement, you might not even have to tinker with the voltages.

I'd set the memory divider to keep it as close to 1066 as possible, which on that board, I think, is the 3.20 setting........leave the voltages at "Auto" and test it out