To celebrate its new custom made skin on the Catzilla 720P benchmark, GIGABYTE is inviting the overclocking community to participate in GIGABYTE CATZILLA OC Contest. Open to all HWBOT members from June 23rd 2014 until July 21st 2014, GIGABYTE invites all Overclockers to suit up for one epic cat fight!

http://hwbot.org/competition/gbt_z97_catzilla

Motherboards however are far more prone to failure as they are harder to cool and often won’t have the same quality of components as the cpu. Even relatively mild overclocks can damage the board in a short time.

Budget for a new motherboard every 12 months if overclocking to the limit on anything cheap. I’m speaking from experience and run an Asus Sabretooth now which has held up so far with fairly extreme overclocking.

You bring up many good points and great examples as well. Not all of this reply is directed at you btw, just going off your good points here.

One, yep, 32 bit apps do not typically run faster on X64, as a matter of fact, if you have a 32 bit system, it will seem speedier than a 64 bit system outright. However, run a 64 bit application that will utilize the cores and you will then see how much faster it truly is. I use Blender and when I went to Blender X64, the render difference was amazing. I mention this due to the overclocking, many people overclock their dual or quads thinking it’s slow when in reality, you need to find X64 software. The reason companies have not produced more X64 bit software? A few, one, because if 32 bit works, they figure why bother? Some may simply not be able to for numerous other reasons.

Life shortening is definitely a factor and those who have not seen shorter life are usually those who have good cooling systems. If you can keep an overclocked pc at a cool temperature, your risk is much less.

Another great point you make is if you are a pc enthusiast, the longevity will be irrelevant. Computers don’t last long if you are overclocking or not. I have helped people find new systems or upgrade and replace parts constantly. Most store bought systems are not expected to go over a few years, yes, some do, some only last until after the warranty is expired. It’s cheaper for people to replace than to repair in many cases. Let’s not forget, most OEM systems are near impossible to OC anyway or don’t have many options to do so, nor would they be worth it. That said, a lot of overclockers do have custom self built computers and as you stated, you had every intention to do so and so do they.

Years back, I was buying OEM systems, Emachine, burned out in two years from numerous reasons, no OCing involved in any OEM I had. HPpavillion, burned out in 3 years and numerous other OEMs that I had. I owned up to 5 on any given year. I began building my own and for my family and we have had our systems for years, upgrading when necessary. The point is, all these NON OC’d systems have come and gone, yet the two of our OC’d home builts are still going albeit not maxed out or anything but still OC’d. So even if not a PC enthusiast, much of the longevity issue is irrelevant as standard systems are not expected to last long anyway. As the old saying goes, they don’t make em like they used to.

This is why I cannot disagree more with tagging overclocking as bad or good, there are a lot of reasons and factors not mentioned about OCing a computer or component.

Most definitely yes!

I have had my q6600 with a default clock of 2400 running at 3337,its been running fine at these speeds for 3 years now. The original price of the chip was about £160 at the time, its overclocked performance is equal to some vastly more expensive chips. It was not quick nor was it easy to get the thing stable and cool, it took many hours of tweaking and testing to make sure it was fairly happy at its new speeds. I did buy it with the intention of overclocking it.

when I moved from single to dual core, I found the dual to be a poor performer on any applications that were not optimised for multi core cpu’s so i overclocked that a little past my old single. Again when i moved from dual to quad the same thing, maximise its performance for older software (mostly games) and of course I also get the speed boost on all the multi-threaded software I use.

The risk of damage by overclcoking is real, it has to be done very carefully and with a lot of patience, frustration, countless crashes and bios resets. Good monitoring software is essential for temperatures, an idea of what the cpu will do if pushed to far, will it fail to boot, fail to post or will it ignore everything and allow itself to fry in seconds?

Shortening the life of it, yes it probably does, but if your a pc enthusiast then the longevity of your cpu will be irrelevant as long as lasts until your next upgrade. Someone once compared the life reduction by overclcocking to snow men and skin cancer, not going to be around long enough to worry about it.

Interesting replies to a questionable article, keep it up :)