does overclocking really pay off

[TonyD]

Originally Posted by Rattlehead

I can only imagine some people go too crazy with their voltages, not knowing the harm they're doing.
But personally I've also never had anything actually stop working as a result of overclocking, not permanently anyway.
(I did see some smoke coming from my old PC once, which was alarming, after a particularly stressful overclock. )

Nowadays I just leave everything at factory settings...

I did once, but pre-Thoroughbred days. My son had a Duron 1 GHz in an A7V mobo that I was trying to get to 1.2 GHz, but pushed the FSB too far for the LAN controller (yeah, I know, it shouldn’t have been plugged in at the time ). I had to settle on 1150 MHz using a modified multiplier (remember the pencil trick?) which was a nice improvement over stock.

In reality there’s not a lot to gain making your cpu run faster, particularly in relation to game performance. There are some circumstances where you will see a difference, but I feel that the risks outweigh the relatively small improvement achieved. These days with unlocked multipliers it’s a lot easier, but there’s still a possibility of over-doing it, and you will only find that out too late. And it’s not necessarily the cpu that will fail, more likely something on the mainboard (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...d,2436-15.html)

Running components faster and/or at higher voltages than specified will shorten their life, but by how much is anyone’s guess. A mate ran an over-clocked GeForce 7800 reliably for nearly a year before it suddenly died, but we never established why.

I suggest that unless you know what you are doing and understand the risks involved, don’t over-clock! It could otherwise be an expensive lesson.