Hi.
I just talked about Overclock with my teacher and he told me that, Overclock will shortens my CPU's life. Is that true?
is it by the heat problem???
if it is, how does it make different

A cpu is built to last over 10 years. If you overclock you cut a small percentage off of it's life. 5-7 years life expectancy... by then you'll have a new cpu.

Don't really know what causes it, but i guess it's cause it's not running under normal conditions so it changes it's life expectancy...extra heat and more stuff going on inside the cpu..wears it out faster i guess.

It will not shoorten the life off a CPU. If your CPU overheats off course it will fry. But a CPU can overheat without overclocking. A CPU will never die without overheating, cracked core, short, ststic, or to much voltage. If you increase your voltage to overclock it could shorten the life of your CPU, but thats the only way from overclocking.

I think your wrong Kevn, ware did you here this?

If you don't increase voltage the life expectency remains unchanged. It is the over voltage exceeding the design limit that might shorten the life of the components inside the processor, with which more heat is generated.

However, with the fast change lately in processor development, associate with motherboard features and price drop, average length of ownership is below 3 years anyway.

So, your teacher is right on the life expectancy, but it should not be the only reason not to overclock.

Lots of places.. just like merubin did.

It's not a myth..just very unlikely. Also not often witnessed, since it takes 5-7 years.

Go download Intel's CPU identifier thing, and if you have it overclocked it will tell you that it shortens the life of the cpu.

Intel knows better than anyone and they say the same.

This question became popular a few years back when cpus started to require active cooling and overclocking became common. There are no physics-based reasons for a limited lifespan of a cpu other than immediate death to to traumatic overheating. The wire in your desk lamp will undergo some copper-redistribution thinning over a 100 years or so due to electron migration, and the same thing happens in a cpu, but to apply those principles over a much shorter timeframe is pure guesswork.

Anyway, because they were pressed with the question over and over, amd engineers finally came out and said that their cpus should be good for 10-20 years. Intel followed that up with a similarly vague statement. So 10 years became the authoritative number, though it was not really meant to be.

Then someone else showed that for every 10 degrees celcius increase, a cpu's lifespan would be cut in half due to the heat-induced changes that happen within a transistor over time. But like the original amd and intel statement of 10 years, this was just theory.

Since neither amd nor intel have ever modified their lifespan predictions (or as far as I know, even re-iterated them), you could certainly say that if a t-bird is supposed to last 10 years at 1.75V and an on-die temp of 70C, then surely a 1.8v tbred with an on die temp of 60C would last as long or longer.

And in their tech docs where both intel and amd give the max operating temps of their cpus, they do not include any statement about running the cpu at this temperature will impact operating life.

So the way it adds up...

nobody knows, and it is not something to worry about.

"Go download Intel's CPU identifier thing, and if you have it overclocked it will tell you that it shortens the life of the cpu"

My view on this statement is that it is a hedge against the sudden death that can happen with over-overclocking as opposed to a gradual death over a period of years.

The encapsulation process of today's processor drastically slow down the metal migration negatively affecting internal circurty.

Product life cycle and product life expectancy are two different things while they were muddy up before. A car engine might have a life expectancy of 200,000 miles, but the life cycle could be 3 to 4 years because of model change which is the length of ownership for the 1st owner. Again, the 200,000 miles life expectancy depends on many factors.

MTBF(mean time before failure) is just statistic. When normal to one is abnormal to another or ideal condition varies from place to place and definetly varies by individuals.

Simply put, life expectancy of today's processor is no longer a factor due to fast change. If you enjoy using an old 386 25mhz system which is slightly older than 9 years of age with Windows 3.11, I agree with your decision to keep your processor as long as you can.

If you overclock your CPU you will definetaly shorten your CPU's life. YOu do not need to check with anyone, because this is widely known to overclockers. The reason that your CPU life is shortened, is mainly because of the temperature rise (at first stage). If you want to "safely"overclock your pc, the first thing you need to do, is to download a program that shows you your actual speed of processor, and a program like cpucool that shows you the CPU temperature. Try using more fans, or water cooling (expensive). N ut do not have any doubt, that you may damage your processor.

Dionisis F
Information Systems Analyst,
ERP Consultant

I don't know exactly the architecture of CPUs, but I believe they are built of thin film materials. Now over voltage may cause sudden breakdown of thin film which in turn causes the sudden death of your CPU. I'm not sure about what overheating does, it may induce dramatic increase of electricity carriers (exponentially), i.e., increase of current, in the circuit which may cause some components not to work properly. Heat may also cause dopants or other defects in the thin film to migrate and finally fail the components. I believe there is one or multiple electronic osccilators in the CPU and these may have certain limits of work load (say highest frequency) they can bare, exceeding these limits may do damage to the osccilators. And finally, there is fatigue problem. Certainly over temperature is not good to battle material and device fatigue.

"If you overclock your CPU you will definetaly shorten your CPU's life. You do not need to check with anyone, because this is widely known to overclockers."

Uh, no, but it is widely debated among overclockers? I've been a part of dozens of such debates with dozens of other overclockers. First we argue theory for a while, then realize than nobody really has a leg to stand on, then all agree that all that really matters is that of the last 100 cpus that any of has seen die, all died a sudden traumatic death due to overheating/overvolting, and 0 died of prolonged overclocking.

You'll see this statement all the time:

"I put my cpu vcore at 1.95V this morning and 5 minutes later it died"

But you never see this statement:

"my cpu has been running overclocked for 2 years (or 3, or 4, etc) now, and today it died.

I agree with Response Number 11 (johnoh). Most people seem to think in this post that overclocking shortens the life of a CPU. I have never had a cpu go bad. As long as you don't let one of the following things happen to your cpu it will never go bad.

overheating, cracked core, short, static, or to much voltage.

No one can prove that there cpu has died from overclocking. It has never happend and it never will.

Those agree the right way to overclock would not shorten processor life. They are overclockers.

Those who disagree might not have overclocked the PC they use daily.

Overclockers in this forum are pretty good and if they misquoted, another overclocker will not be silence for long.

ya, I'll agree with johnoh too. though i've only overclocked my CPU just a week ago, which is my first one, and it's working great. johnoh's(res.11) statement is the strongest in here for sure.

How can you not agree with johnoh, his logic is solid (no I'm not sucking up), every CPU I have owned, I have overclocked (attempted anyway), admittedly I have never done anything extreme, but I am yet to kill a cpu. I have a Celeron 400 that has been running overclocked for over 4 years now, and its running as strong as the day I bought it.