I have never overclocked or even considered it. I'm wondering if it's really worth it. Considering the possibility of burning up a chip, or having lockups, hardware issues, boot problems, voiding of warranty etc, it just seems for the possible problems you don't gain enough of a noticable improvement.

Again, I'm not saying I'm correct in my thoughts, I'm just truely asking if it's worth it.

no noticable improvements? I've seen people with an athlonxp 1600+ (1.4ghz) unlock the core, up the FSB to 212mhz (424DDR) and get speeds past 2.0ghz. YOu cant do this with standard cooling but the jump to 2.0ghz alone is a large improvement and the ram running at an effective rate of 424mhz is amazing.

Been running a 1 Ghz T'bird at 1.2 for over a year without a lockup and the benches eat a P4 i.6 alive ! If it is done correctly (proper cooling), it si perfectly stable. Plus chips are dirt cheap now anyway so what the hell !

Glen,
Overclocking covers more things than just the CPU. Like for e.g. the memory, bus speeds, bios setting, jumpers ect. To be honest I can take two same Mobo's, CPU's ect. and underclock the one CPU(with out mod the chip)and the factory CPU(with out mod the chip) and the system with the underclocked CPU will out perform the standard clocked CPU. Like Mile said if it's done correctly things will be good or should I say great.
Also have been running a 1Ghz Athlon T-Bird @ a little over 1.3 on one of my systems for over a year. Only problem I had with that system was a bad stick of memory.

Glen
Definition Overclocking- clocking beyond normally designed specs.

There are 2 groups. The ones who want a stabile machine (measure work in hours) and the ones who (measure work in benchmarks). Reality is overclocking is an ego thing. Most Overclockers will do much less work than those who don't.
People who require stability will run multiple machines hours on end while overclockers do short bursts. Nobody in their right mind would sacrifice blowing 8 hours of work by taking a chance to get it done a few minutes earlier. If a machine is too slow then 4 times faster would be the minimum effective gain to settle on. 5% to 20% is piddly.

Now if a chip was designed at 500mhz and sold with 400mhz labeled on the chip then nothing is lost by putting it where it belongs. You're really not overclocking the chip, it's just mislabeled due to a sales tactic. The athlon XPs should all be the same because the processor is dropped onto a small board with jumpers. The processors are all made from the same die but the small boards aren't. The only difference is a jumper tracing and price.

Ray,
"Now if a chip was designed at 500mhz and sold with 400mhz labeled on the chip then nothing is lost by putting it where it belongs. You're really not overclocking the chip, it's just mislabeled due to a sales tactic." Well put :-)

I would say I'm in your first group and for blowing 8 hours of work. When I'm working on a project I don't wait 8 hours to back it up. Somebody who would wait 8 hours to back up what they are working on. Now that is "Nobody in their right mind"

The Athlon CPU I talked about has not been moded still factory. No paint or anything else done to it. So I guess you would say it was mislabeled.

If you're looking to give ur computer that extra edge overclocking might not be the answer. I do it just for a laugh, messing around with old CPUs and Graphics cards. The way to really get the most from you're hardware is to make sure its all quality stuff. I use an old HP Netserver E50 everyday, running an ancient PII 333 (not overclocked i may add) and the combination of a half decent motherboard and SCSI drives ensures it's more than usable. I've also found it to be faster than PCs my friends are running with Athlons. My advise is to buy an old server, chuck in a graphics card, sound card, maybe a bit more RAM ... then leave it alone ;)

Star
I do video work and when I compile, the result can be 4 hours on a p3_800. One show of "Enterprise" with the stretching of the letterbox format and clipping it off takes almost 4 hours to process in mpeg. If I stop it, all the work is gone. If I went with indeo's 5.1x codec and similiar compression, 8 hours is what it takes. Luckily Indeo's codec is more forgiving and allows a continuance of a partial file.