Overclocking

[FMod]

I apologize for hammering this thread, but with retention times being what they are on Nexus I'm compelled to correct bad information when it's posted as fact. When voltage and temperature are kept within limits, there's nothing inherently damaging about overclocking a cpu or gpu. Even motherboard, video card etc etc manufacturers do it with their own products, with no effect whatsoever on MTBF.

 

They're not entirely wrong. With the rare exception of overclock+downvolt combos, everything else equal, overclocking will always affect some of the factors that determine the lifespan.

 

Specifically, overclocking will always result in a higher temperature than stock clocks with the same cooling, assuming optimal voltage in both cases. Electronic component lifespan is always a function of temperature, often also voltage, clock rate (cycle frequency), and cycle depth.

 

Whether overclocking will really reduce the assembled system's expected lifetime depends on which components have the shortest lifetime, or which failure modes are the most likely to occur, once the system is overclocked. If it's the ones affected by overclocking, yes. Otherwise, no.

 

So if you want a brief executive summary, everything else equal, overclocking will never increase lifetime, but may decrease it. Uncertainty turns "no" into "low probability". Therefore the average outcome is a decrease.

 

Now, what doesn't reduce lifetime is making everything else not equal. An overclocked system built with high-end parts, low-jitter 80+ platinum PSU, overspecced VRM, optimized voltage, custom cooling, in a negative pressure case, with the dust cleaned out every few months, will very often have a longer lifetime than a stock system with a stock cooler. But it won't cost the same either.

 

Of course, the most common PC failure mode is "it can't run this year's Crysis", and this one may actually be deferred by overclocking. This is why the actual system lifetime is rarely reduced by overclocking. But this isn't what people think of as a failure, so, excluding it, 'rarely' is still a little in terms of the averages.

Edited August 31, 2016 by FMod

[TheMastersSon]

Electrical components including cpus and gpus are rated to operate within specific voltage and temperature limits. Using our i5 system as an example, the cpu can handle up to a 15% overclock with no additional voltage and only 1-2C of additional heat (that's still 25C under the chip's limit). And the claim was that overclocking inherently degrades a chip. If your response is that speed necessarily equals damage or decreased lifespan, that's simply incorrect. By the same logic, nobody should ever run anything except at its slowest possible speed, because anything faster "degrades" it.

 

As long as voltage and temperature are kept within spec, nothing remains to damage a chip, or affect its lifespan in any practical way. That's not a claim, it's been proven by millions of overclocked systems and components around the world. Heck these days it's hard to find any motherboard or video card etc that's NOT overclocked or overclockable. Even Intel sells unlocked cpus. :wink:

Edited September 1, 2016 by TheMastersSon

[FMod]

As long as voltage and temperature are kept within spec, nothing remains to damage a chip, or affect its lifespan in any practical way. That's not a claim, it's been proven by millions of overclocked systems and components around the world.

Operating electronic components in ANY way degrades them.

Every electronic component has a finite lifetime, which is a function of the load applied to it.

This isn't a claim either, it's been proven by hundreds of millions of PC components that have failed to date.

 

Now, as to whether overclocking has an effect on components' expected lifespan, the answer is, everything else equal, a definitive yes. Check this calculator, for instance: http://www.illinoiscapacitor.com/tech-center/life-calculators.aspx

 

Very roughly, every extra 10 degrees Celsius halve the lifespan.

Every 10% above the rated voltage halve the lifespan, every 10% below double it.

Overclocking applies more voltage (modern mobos do it automatically) and produces more heat, meaning a shorter expected lifespan for every component.

 

Now, whether it matters is another question. It comes down to whether the parts MOST affected by overclocking are also the most likely to fail FIRST.

 

A high-end motherboard or GPU with a 10+2 phase VRM has headroom, provided by its extra components and higher specs components, which are SPECIFICALLY there to deal with the lifespan reduction produced by overclocking. So it will rarely fail first. A cheap one with a 4+1 phase doesn't, and will often fail first, especially if significantly overclocked.

 

Same with the PSU, a 850W Platinum unit has the headroom for powerful overclocked CPU and GPU, consuming say 400W, and will rarely fail first. A 450W Bronze unit doesn't, and often will fail first.

 

I'm not saying "don't overclock". I'm saying that overclocking does increase the load on a system. It will, depending on the amount of headroom, either significantly or insignificantly reduce its probable lifespan. Now, most of the time, it's still very much worth it. But the limit to which it's worth it is NOT determined by the chip's maximum safe voltage. It's determined by how much power the chip will require at given settings and by how much POWER HEADROOM the other components have.

 

The effect is almost exponential as you're approaching their capacity. Today, most decent systems have some headroom and most cheap ones have overclocking locked up. A little as ten years ago, you could with certainty fry low-end motherboards of some well-known brands simply by installing the most powerful chip they supposedly could handle. As little as five years ago, certain well-known brands of PSU by giving them their full advertised load.

[TheMastersSon]

FMod, current generation i5's and i7's can be substantially overclocked with zero additional voltage and virtually no extra heat. So your power/headroom point is moot. As for temps, you seem intent on making ridiculous statements like "Operating electronic components in ANY way degrades them", as if specs somehow don't exist or chips aren't built to specific specs etc. There's a difference between technically correct and practically relevant, and I wish you'd ask Intel exactly how much additional "degradation" takes place when a chip that's rated to run up to 80C is run at 55C instead of 54C. Even the technical difference is barely measurable, the practical difference is entirely non-existent.

 

My point is that imo we're arguing two different points. In cases where substantial additional voltage and/or temps are required, of course overclocking will affect a chip's practical lifespan. It's not the case with many of today's cpus and gpus.

Edited September 2, 2016 by TheMastersSon

[FMod]

Zero additional voltage that you can see. Modern CPU don't operate at fixed voltage anymore, and modern motherboards manage voltage automatically and will raise it automatically at higher clocks.

 

Disabling this functionality by locking the CPU to a fixed voltage will also mess with its power saving features and ultimately usually consume more energy rather than less.

 

 

 

"Operating electronic components in ANY way degrades them", as if specs somehow don't exist or chips aren't built to specific specs etc

Quite the contrary - specs tell you EXACTLY this.

For instance, here is a capacitor spec sheet: http://www.goldeno.com/pictures/EETED2W561EA.pdf

It says, quite literally:

"Capacitors shall withstand a load life test consisting of the application of rated voltage and ripple current under the following conditions:
Time: 3000 hours

Ambient Temperature: 105 °C

Maximum Ripple:

Current: 3.50 A

Frequency: 120 Hz"

Rated Working Voltage: 450 VDC

This doesn't mean you're supposed to replace them every 3000 hours - that would be every 4 months. The specs only cite load life at a specific set of conditions. The same capacitor will withstand about 24,000 hours at 85C and 450 VDC, or at 95C and 405 VDC, or about 100,000 hours at 65C and 400 VDC.

 

Hard drives are rated to a lifetime of N1 years and N2 hours. SSD to N1 years and N2 terabytes written. etc, etc, etc. Every component has a design life and every electronic component gradually degrades in operation.

CPU themselves are some of the longest-lived components, so they very rarely fail first. Their power supplies on the motherboard and in the PSU usually do.

[TheMastersSon]

Zero additional voltage that you can see. Modern CPU don't operate at fixed voltage anymore, and modern motherboards manage voltage automatically and will raise it automatically at higher clocks.

Well my hardware monitors beg to differ with you. Since when does a motherboard increase cpu voltage past its own limits? We've had a hardware monitor on ours for over a year and it's never exceeded its bios setting (plus offset, which is also bios specified). Not once. I've never read of such a thing in any review, at least since the Pentium II days.

 

To add one other point, the term degradation in cpu and gpu specs has a specific meaning, beyond the basic one you explained. You are correct that any given voltage applied to any circuit will cause degradation, but in practical terms, e.g. expected lifetimes for cpus, a specific combination of voltage and temps either causes practical damage or it doesn't. This is likely why our P4 has been chugging along with a 20% overclock and at 1.65v for 12 years, while many or most other P4 Northwoods that were overvolted past 1.7v now grace our country's landfills. That tiny fraction of a volt is the known difference between electromigration problems on that chip and no electromigration problems whatsoever, and a similar limit can be found for any chip. Apparently the i5's is something at or just over 1.3v etc.

Edited September 2, 2016 by TheMastersSon

[Ovennamedheats]

So are there multiple iterations of the Intel 5 4690K? I've seen many upgrade kits on Newegg(glad to have found that site)that offer it but with any number of motherboards, choosing a motherboard seems most difficult for me.

[FMod]

Well my hardware monitors beg to differ with you. Since when does a motherboard increase cpu voltage past its own limits? (plus offset, which is also bios specified). We've had a hardware monitor on ours for over a year and it's never exceeded its bios setting...

Where did I say anything about exceeding any limits?

This doesn't even happen anymore. Current top CPU overclocking, outside of extreme experiments, is limited by heat, not safe voltage.

 

Anyway, it increases the voltage. Not above the limits for the chip and for the motherboard. But higher clock rate means more voltage and more power (power ~ frequency * voltage^2).

 

As for the BIOS setting, you don't even use a voltage setting on modern LGA1151 motherboards. You can force a fixed voltage, but it disables the CPU's power management features.

And, at that, I've never seen a K-part run the same voltage at 4.7-4.9 GHz as its non-K counterpart at its 3.3-3.7 GHz anyway.

 

 

Now, where it matters is not CPU degradation, it's power and thermal load on the motherboard and the PSU, plus overall increased temperature inside the case. And that depends on your situation.

 

If you're an enthusiast that can replace anything anytime you want, then no problem, the resulting reduction in lifetime from moderate overclock (about 4.5 for Skylake), especially for the kind of quality parts you'd buy for yourself, is very tolerable or outright negligible.

 

If you're building it for your grandma in another state, who plans to upgrade it sometime never, and you'll have to come fix it if it breaks, and you're an average college kid on a very tight budget - that's a very different situation.

 

If you're buying 1,000 of these for 100 locations, and you have no ability to specify component quality, so only the cheapest compatible parts will be bought, and these machines will be replaced with the exact old PCs they're currently replacing if they break - that's also a very different situation. (And also a further more realistic one, as in real, than the made-up grandma scenario).

 

In both of the latter situations, you'll very likely end up sticking powerful chips on cheap motherboards and PSU, in cheap cases, that will be buried between stacks of papers and won't be opened for a decade. In both of those cases, even an extra 1% failure rate per year is suddenly a much bigger deal. And it will be well over 1% if you clock the CPU in these boxes to their safe voltage limit.

 

 

 

So are there multiple iterations of the Intel 5 4690K? I've seen many upgrade kits on Newegg(glad to have found that site)that offer it but with any number of motherboards, choosing a motherboard seems most difficult for me.

The 4690K is outdated. Unless you already have it, get the i5-6600K.

It's not much faster, but it's basically better in every way (unless you run Windows 7 rather than 10).

 

That will be the LGA1151 socket and you want a Z170 motherboard with it. The Asus Z170A is passable, or the Asrock Extreme3 if you don't want to overpay.

 

[TheMastersSon]

> So are there multiple iterations of the Intel 5 4690K? I've seen many upgrade kits on Newegg(glad to have found that site)that offer it but with any number of motherboards, choosing a motherboard seems most difficult for me.

 

It's a Haswell chip on an Asus Hero VII motherboard, the system was built from the ground up to look backward not forward, and run older games. Unless you have a similar intent, upgrade money is much better spent on Skylake imo, as it's all about PCI lanes these days, NVMe, M.2 etc.

 

If you're set on Haswell, Gigabyte and others still have Z97 motherboards (e.g. GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK). Just don't look for any future proofing. :smile:

 

To FMod, I'm in front of and not behind your claims about grandma.

Edited September 2, 2016 by TheMastersSon

[Ovennamedheats]

Ok, I've decided that I'm not going to overclock as I'm not as educated right now about computers anyway and I see that 3.5 ?hz is about what I can get which is better than what I have( I'll try to update my profile) with what I have. I am building a PC from scratch. Already have the gpu listed earlier and a soundblaster audigy pro I think. I don't want to play anything more recent than Elder Scrolls online. The only heavy hitters for me that is would be the Elder Scrolls 3,4,5; FO 3, NV, Dragon Age and Mass Effect games and other older stuff. I plan on having a dual boot XP and 7 machine. Sky is NOT the limit in terms of funds.