Does rendering damage computers?

[Inzaine]

I wanted to get back into SFM on my new computer ; however I've heard that rendering can damage computers. Is this true?

[tf2player]

hasn't damaged mine and I've rendered over 100 times, about half of it at max settings

[Zappy]

Yes, it does. If you're interested in knowing how much it damages your computer, it damages your computer almost just as much as playing games or browsing the internet or in general having it turned on. This, however, is so little you should never worry about it, as you will get a new computer before anything even the slightest bit serious can happen to your computer (besides viruses or malware, but that's not something Source FilmMaker gives your computer, certainly not just by rendering).

[episoder]

nah, rendering doesn't damage computers. if your heatsinks and coolers work it'll not burn.

[Marco Skoll]

The more intensive a computing process is, the more power is needed.
Increased power usage means increases heat output, and naturally, the life of components is shortened by running at higher temperatures.

Rendering is reasonably intensive, so ultimately, it could be said to damage a computer.

That said, in all my years of computing, I have seen very few components that failed before they were just plain obsolete. (Other than disk drives or failures caused by external means - I have one story about someone who somehow managed to plug 168-pin RAM into 184-pin slots, which managed to fry the RAM, Motherboard and CPU all at once).

The only GPU I personally can recall ever having failed on me was the G86-770-A2 GPU on my old laptop, and that's because the 770 version was made out of thoroughly inadequate materials that went soggy when the GPU got up to temperature. (A 771 version was released to rectify the error).

Most components, however, will comfortably keep working for years, if not decades.

So basically, the technical answer is "Yes", but the practical answer is "No".

[tf2player]

export image doesn't work for me

[psi onix]

i dont' know about anyone else, but one time when i was rendering in SFM one of the GPU fans blasted off the bottom of the GPU heatsink, flew down and bounced off the power supply, bounced off the image drive, bounced off the cpu water block, bounced off the motherboard then blasted out the side case window and hit me directly in the face. i contacted the law offices of Mendacity & Malarky but they didn't believe my story. i plan to render out a reenactment in SFM to show them.

[Pte Jack]

The true answer if rendering can damage a computer is Maybe! As Marco and Zappy pointed out, it depends on the components inside the computer/laptop.

If the ventilation is not sufficient enough over the heat syncs in a computer/laptop, the heat generated "over time" can be enough heat to de-ball the soldering that binds the components to the circuit boards for integrated graphics chips, CPUs, memory, GPUs, etc. The heat can also melt or "fry" lower end components rather quickly.

This is what happened to my good laptop and mind you I used that for more than just rendering SFM pictures and videos.

"Over time" in my case was 7 years of life and during the last 3 and a half, the heat was even more intense than the first 4 because I started doing all my 3d stuff (on top of playing component and graphics heavy games) on the laptop as well. (This is actually 2 years longer than the expected life of a higher end laptop under a stressful load which is normally 4-5 years. If you get more than 5 years out of a Laptop, then the laptop has probably outlived the life expectencies of the components it was built with anyway.)

So, in essecents my laptop was damaged because of the vast amounts of heat generated by rendering and other processes because the heat syncs did not dissapate the generated heat well enough and eventually (like over 7 years) the solder balls that connect various components to the motherboard separarted and failed causing continous machine exception errors and crashes.

If you are using a laptop or computer that is not designed for intense or stressful gameplay, you can expect it to fail a lot sooner.