To O/C or Not to O/C

[Master Chef Richard Campbell]

On a lark last night I bummed the multiplier up on my retail Athlon XP 2500+
Barton to 2 Ghz. It is now reported as a Athlon XP 2700+. I ran Memtest for
12 hours with no errors and have been editing baby videos for about 4 hours.
I checked the Asus probe temp log and it a flat line at 40C. Should I leave
it Overclocked or should I change it back. Is there a serious draw back or
should I just enjoy the performance boost.

Chef

 

[Bugsy]

Oh Yes, the great OC or NOC debate.
Bottom Line from numerous threads about this subject.Two schools of
thinking.
Overclocking will eventually take it's toll on a processor and shorten the
life to a degree that is not predictable with any real certainty. Some last
for quite awhile and others fail in shorter times.
However, the other school believes that overclocking and getting at least 6
months from a processor is fine since they would be moving into a new
processor at that time frame or possibly a new motherboard and processor to
keep current with the improvements.
Take your pick.
Personally, I run an XP 2700 at 400MHz with the same speed memory and 2,200
Mhz.
It runs about 118 Degrees F with average room temps and a decent fan and
heatsink air cooled.
When it quits or starts erroring I'll buy another one because I don't give a
rats ass.

Bugs.

 

[Steve Trussing]

On a lark last night I bummed the multiplier up on my retail Athlon

XP 2500+ Barton to 2 Ghz. It is now reported as a Athlon XP 2700+. I
ran Memtest for 12 hours with no errors and have been editing baby
videos for about 4 hours. I checked the Asus probe temp log and it a
flat line at 40C. Should I leave it Overclocked or should I change it
back. Is there a serious draw back or should I just enjoy the
performance boost.

Forget memtest86; I'd run Prime95 within Windows, while using the system
normally (Prime95 will run at low priority, and should not have any
noticable impact on performance. Just make sure you set the memory
limit [Options > Cpu] to something reasonable).

I would let this go on for at least 2 full days, preferably 3 or more,
with Prime95 running as a tray icon. And if Prime95 doesn't report an
error, you should be good to go.

http://www.mersenne.org/

 

[Witchy]

On a lark last night I bummed the multiplier up on my retail Athlon XP 2500+
Barton to 2 Ghz. It is now reported as a Athlon XP 2700+. I ran Memtest for
12 hours with no errors and have been editing baby videos for about 4 hours.
I checked the Asus probe temp log and it a flat line at 40C. Should I leave
it Overclocked or should I change it back. Is there a serious draw back or
should I just enjoy the performance boost.

I used to be with the 'naah it shortens the life of the cpu' crowd,
but once I got my XP2600+ (having sorted out the previous random
crashing problems) and read a lot of threads and tech websites about
o/c I went for it.....still a bit cautious but it's run pretty much
non-stop for a couple of weeks at 2.2ghz (175 FSB). It's sitting
flat-lined at 50 degrees C which is exactly what my non-OCd XP1800 ran
at.

Oh, I also realised I pretty much upgrade every year, so if it dies,
so what? I've had my use and fun out of it

cheers

witchy/binarydinosaurs

 

[kmchow]

I say if your computer runs stably when o/c, why not o/c? And o/c, your CPU
should still serve you 4-5 years?