Is Overclocking your computer bad for it?

[Goose]

i heard that you can possabley wreck your computer overclocking it,
Is this true?

[Killabyte]

Adding more volts = more heat which degrades life of chip. Below 85c for Intel i7's is where you want to be for a 24hr OC being fully stable. Liquid cooling is the answer for this. As far as being "bad for it" incorrect settings can always be bad so do research before attempting to OC. Here's an example, any basclock setting above 100 with my setup causes my GTX 480 videocard not to idle down to the lowest coreclock when idling. Any of the Intel i5's or i7's will run all of the current games right now without being OC. It's better to have a high-end model discrete videocard for gaming with a decent cpu.

[Goose]

ok, well thanks for helping me out with that

[Staryn]

Overclocking can damage your hardware, depending on the quality of the hardware, how much you overclock and, and other factors. Heat is the obvious one, but you can also have stability problems when overclocking. Overclocking takes more power, which can require an increased voltage...not having enough power can cause issues, having too much can serious damage your computer.

Some computers can handle it, but generally you are risking reducing the life of your CPU (if that's what you are overclocking).

[_I_]

depends on the cpu, board, cooling, ram, temps, and many other factors

[Killabyte]

Np. Really OC is all about fun and benchmarking to see how far you can push your system compared to others and not needed to run specific games as much as a high-end vidcard (unless of course you have an fairly old cpu). My nividia GTX 480 runs all the current games on max settings with no problems, it's roughly equivalent to a 560Ti.

[Soulwatcher]

No matter what anyone tells you overclocking will forsure shorten the life of your system. In others words dont overclock unless you cn afford to fix what breaks. I could break in a month or 2 years, but forure it will break eventually.