OT: New PC!

[Thermodyne]

But at what temp will it combust? Most of the dust inside a PC is from the local environment. In a school environment that would be mostly carpet fiber, ceiling fibers, chalk and human misc. like skin, hair, and clothing. Not a real good source of tinder. Also, the insides of a PC are very fire resistant. That’s one of the reasons that they are so hard on the environment.

Let’s look at this from an informed point of view.

First, did you actually see the fire, or the charred PC lab?

Second, how would OC’ing cause the fire? The CPU is long dead before it reaches 200c; the power supply has built in thermal protection. Newer CPU’s have thermal protection too. And there are no high voltage components on the mainboard. At best, the alleged OC would have been modest, so that the systems would have been stable enough to run for an extended period of time. OCing involves bumping up the multiplier and or the Front side Buss frequency. If possible, you will also want to bump up the Vcore a tenth of a volt or even 5 tenths. None of this is the stuff fires are made from.

Now some point’s of reality. Most schools buy commercial off the shelf PC’s. You aren’t going to do much OC’ing on them. At best they will have a FSB jumper with 66, 100, and 133MHz settings. They might also have some settings for the memory. But for the sake of conversation, we will assume that these were custom OC’able systems. These would also be built to operate safely at their most aggressive settings. In the real world, we kill parts when we start v-modding boards and cards. I seriously doubt that the teacher let the students start bypassing circuits with 1000 ohm trimmers and such. So let’s assume that the system was OC’ed and overheated. It would have shut down long before it got hot enough to ignite dust, unless something was done to actually cause a fire. Magnesium filament and flammable liquid wired to a NS relay would be the easy way, but again I doubt this could happen in a school and not be found out.

And lastly, lots of peeps here have had system shutdowns caused by accumulated dust. They don’t catch fire; they just shut down or lock up. PC are basically fire proof, the plastic won’t even sustain a flame. Until recently, the insides were coated with a fire retardant dust. Many of the components vent fluorocarbons at high temps. They will smoke and stink profusely, but seldom if ever burn.

[JAFisher44]

Well, fire hazards aside, The reason I would never OC a chip is because it is bad for it. Period. No matter how well cooled the chip is OCing will reduce its life expectancy. Chips are built to run at certain speeds. The process of heating and cooling causes the silicon in the chip to expand and contract. The materials used are rated to do this at a certain speed. If you overclock (even with proper cooling) this will occur more often and to a greater degree and will degrade the chip. This means that the chip will fail sooner than it would at its rated speed, often far sooner. This is why you should not do it.

Not to mention the fact that overclocking your chip is a guarenteed recipie for failure if your cooling system ever hiccups. Sure, overclocking is fun if you can afford to buy a new system every year, or buy multiple chips, if necessary, when things go wrong, but for your average working joe, you would be best served to just use it at rated specs.

If you do insist on overclocking you should go with a Pentium chip, as they seem to tollerate it better, relatively, than AMD chips. However this means that you have to use a Pentium chip (not good if you want a gaming machine). I would also recommend dropping a some cash on a good liquid cooling system as well.

[JAFisher44]

By the way, SATA is a similar technology to the older PATA technology which is being phased out. PATA, or Parallel ATA, is what you are most likely using if you have the flat ribbon cables connecting your hard drives and cd drives to your computer. Parallel meaning that there are multiple parallel wires in the cable which each carry information at the same time.

In the time of the dinosaurs everything was serial, meaning that there was one wire connecting a drive to a computer. Of course when people ran into frequency limits and could advance no further, someone got the brilliant idea to just add more wires. 8x the connections means 8x the speed.

Well, using parallel wires has its own set of problems. The major one being RF. See, when an electrical signal moves down a wire it creates a sort of radio frequency "shock wave". This shock wave is stronger the higher the frequency of the signal. This RF shock wave interferes with the signals in parallel wires. Over time, several things were done to limit this sort of problem. For example in most modern parallel cables there is an inactive "buffer" wire in between all active wires. This wire helps to absorb the RF interference.

So, now that tech has advanced, we have new materials that can handle far greater frequencies than we used to be able to use, but, if we run in parallel the interference kills the cable. So, we return to serial.

SATA, or Serial ATA, is a new interface for drives that provides serial information transfer for a drive at higher frequencies. Because of the previously stated increases in tech we are now able to increase the frequency to a point that even with only 2 wires (one to send and one to receive) they out-perform 40 wire parallel cables (26 of those carry data). Also, the cables can be much longer for SATA than for PATA, 39 inches vs. 18 inches.

So, basically SATA is a new controller that allows for far faster data transfer at lower power costs. Buy it. Use it. Enjoy it. It's just better.

[Thermodyne]

JAFisher44 said:
Well, fire hazards aside, The reason I would never OC a chip is because it is bad for it. Period. No matter how well cooled the chip is OCing will reduce its life expectancy. Chips are built to run at certain speeds. The process of heating and cooling causes the silicon in the chip to expand and contract. The materials used are rated to do this at a certain speed. If you overclock (even with proper cooling) this will occur more often and to a greater degree and will degrade the chip. This means that the chip will fail sooner than it would at its rated speed, often far sooner. This is why you should not do it.

Not to mention the fact that overclocking your chip is a guarenteed recipie for failure if your cooling system ever hiccups. Sure, overclocking is fun if you can afford to buy a new system every year, or buy multiple chips, if necessary, when things go wrong, but for your average working joe, you would be best served to just use it at rated specs.

If you do insist on overclocking you should go with a Pentium chip, as they seem to tollerate it better, relatively, than AMD chips. However this means that you have to use a Pentium chip (not good if you want a gaming machine). I would also recommend dropping a some cash on a good liquid cooling system as well.

Your first statement is partially true. But it’s not the increase in frequency that causes it. The additional Vcore accelerates electron migration, which is what ages the chip. Heat cycles don’t come into play, and of themselves are not large enough to adversely affect the chip. So my chip last seven years of 24/7 instead of 12, I really don’t care.

Your second statement is false. Chips are hardwired to run at certain speeds. They are designed to run in a target spectrum of speeds. The speeds are determined by binning each lot, then burning to fit inventory needs. If you get a P4 woody of 2.4GHz and another of 1.8GHz, and they have the same lot # on the core, they are the same chip. One had the multiplier burned to 19 and the other was burned to 18. Other than that, they are the same chip.

Your third statement is not true; the materials seldom change within a family of chips. One P4 woody is the same as any other P4 woody material wise. More often than not, it is manufacturing advances that change not the materials.

Your fifth statement is a repeat, but it is still untrue. Electron migration is the problem, and it is caused by voltage. Older processors could be killed by heat, but it took excessive amounts, far beyond what a stable system would run at. Newer chips have built in thermal protection.

Your sixth statement is untrue. If the cooler fails, the thermal protection will shut down the system. More likely, the system would gradually overheat, causing the OC to become unstable, and cause data corruption which would eventually crash the system.

Your seventh statement is sort of a generalization, and a mater of personal opinion. What people can afford is none of my business so long as they manage to pay the bill. Some people OC just to push the state of the art. Others do it because they can’t afford top end hardware to run new games with; others do it because they enjoy it. Who are you to say what would be best for them?

Your last statement is pure uninformed bull****. While Intel systems still hold the reputation of being the most stable, the only place they exceed AMD on OC’ing is raw FSB and cold start on chilled systems. You can not alter the multiplier on an Intel chip, and if you push the Vcore more than a couple of tenths, you’ll be flirting with sudden P4 death. Push it to 1.8v and you can measure the life in hours. AMD chips thrive at 1.8 and on most of them, you can alter the multiplier. Also AMD offers a chip just for the OC’ing crowd. The FX comes with an unlocked multiplier. Also, AMD chips tend to cost less, so it hurts less when you kill one. So, if you want to do serious OC’ing, you are more or less forced to use AMD. Also, 90+% of OC’d computers are cooled with air. Water cooling is for the hard core guys, and phase change is almost a novelty. I probably know 400peeps who OC. Very few, less than 20, use anything other than air for cooling. Perhaps 15 use water and there are five of us with phase change systems. AFAIK, I’m the only one still messing with pelts. The average OC of the people I know is probably 100MHz on the FSB. These systems run for years like this with no problem.

[Renegade 13]

Thermodyne said:
You can not alter the multiplier on an Intel chip, and if you push the Vcore more than a couple of tenths, you’ll be flirting with sudden P4 death. Push it to 1.8v and you can measure the life in hours.

So in other words, OC'ing can easily fry a chip, if you do it wrong! Since many people don't have much knowledge of OC'ing, they really shouldn't do it since there'd be a pretty good chance that they'd totally fry something, simply by doing it wrong. On the other hand, I'm sure you're right that if done correctly OC'ing will do no harm, since when your chip lasts only 8 years instead of the 12 it might have, its so far out of date that it doesn't matter.

[Caduceus]

I love my ATI Radeon X800 XL, but check out NVIDIA New Card

[Thermodyne]

Renegade 13 said:


So in other words, OC'ing can easily fry a chip, if you do it wrong! Since many people don't have much knowledge of OC'ing, they really shouldn't do it since there'd be a pretty good chance that they'd totally fry something, simply by doing it wrong. On the other hand, I'm sure you're right that if done correctly OC'ing will do no harm, since when your chip lasts only 8 years instead of the 12 it might have, its so far out of date that it doesn't matter.

Sure, there is no protection for the uninformed. But, with that said, adjusting Vcore is more advanced than basic OC’ing. And a three year old chip is usually not worth much. Unless you need it and it’s the only one you have. People “OC” all kinds of things and in so doing usually trade off some reliability for performance. Cars, RC toy cars, game consoles, their own bodies are some of the things that come to mind. TV repair has been doing it for years. Remember when that old console TV got dim when you were a kid? A man came out and for a few bucks made it as good as new. He installed a voltage kicker onto the tube harness and kicked the voltage to the guns up. I always wondered what that did to the radiation coming out the other side

Let’s state some obvious things here. IMHO You should not go hog wild OC'ing your only rig if you can't afford to replace it. And it would be best if you had a good knowledge of how PC's work before you start altering default settings.

As an example, the board listed in the build above comes with an OC’ing program. The OC ability of the board is the main reason people will pay almost $200 for it. It will allow you to OC on the fly, or to have it happen automatically only when the system needs more speed. You can set it to specific settings, or as a percentage of system speed. All you need to know is how to use a mouse. It does not allow the average user to make big Vcore changes. These still have to be done in the bios code. IIRC, the highest bump is 10%. That would work fine for anyone willing to invest in some upgraded air cooling. 5% would be fine for any stock system that was not in an overly hot environment. The ability to OC is more or less universally included in aftermarket PC parts these days. The OC’ing crowd makes up the largest segment of the market for these parts, and demand that the ability be included.

[LonghornXtreme]

JAFisher44 said:
Well, fire hazards aside, The reason I would never OC a chip is because it is bad for it. Period. No matter how well cooled the chip is OCing will reduce its life expectancy. Chips are built to run at certain speeds. The process of heating and cooling causes the silicon in the chip to expand and contract. The materials used are rated to do this at a certain speed. If you overclock (even with proper cooling) this will occur more often and to a greater degree and will degrade the chip. This means that the chip will fail sooner than it would at its rated speed, often far sooner. This is why you should not do it.

Not to mention the fact that overclocking your chip is a guarenteed recipie for failure if your cooling system ever hiccups. Sure, overclocking is fun if you can afford to buy a new system every year, or buy multiple chips, if necessary, when things go wrong, but for your average working joe, you would be best served to just use it at rated specs.

If you do insist on overclocking you should go with a Pentium chip, as they seem to tollerate it better, relatively, than AMD chips. However this means that you have to use a Pentium chip (not good if you want a gaming machine). I would also recommend dropping a some cash on a good liquid cooling system as well.

I know that quote was from one of the first few pages of this thread and I'll admit I haven't read past that post...

I just have to disspell some myths about overclocking:

1) 80% of the time (or more) chips from the same architecture come off of the same piece of silicon. The manufacturer then tests the stablilty of the chip and the voltage requirements for each chip... the chips are then coded by these tests and binned (separated into model #'s i.e. the difference between lets say an A64X23800 and a 4200)

2) In the first production runs of a certain architecture i.e. right when the chip comes out, the above process IS important when determining the durability and stability of the higher clock speed chips. BUT once the fabrication kinks are ironed out, most chips are exactly (i hate using the word exact, of course they're not identical, but for turning the chip up to a higher 'stock' speed and other overclocking purposes, it's the same) the same pieces of silicon, just multiplier locked from the factory.

3) AMD and Intel sell vast more amounts of mid ranged and lower chips than their bleeding edge models

4) All processors 'wear out.' Lets say stock speed it'll last 50,000 hours at 100% usage (purely hypothetical number for the hours, it's a large number) And let's say that same chip with a good heatsink and fan or other properly designed cooling system is clocked up 300mhz will run 45,000 hours at 100% usage. The key is 100% usage... most computer users will have periods of 100% and then their CPU's will idle... Not to mention most of the upper end chips wear out faster than the lower end chips of the same architecture... see where I'm getting to?

4b) All processors are designed to go through cycles of hot and cold just like an engine is designed to go through cycles of hot and cold.

5) If your computer catches fire: well you didn't take care of your dust bunnies EVER, or something was way more wrong with the computer than overclocking. (I know this wasn't in the quote, BUT it was in a post preceding it)

With proper chip selection and timing, it is possible to buy the same qualtiy chip. With proper cooling you can insure a long lifetime of the chip. And with proper knowledge of overclocking the chip can be absolutely 1000's of hours prime 95 stable (that means it ran prime95 constantly and never had a false calculation, good test for CPU and RAM stability)

I have no problem with people that spend more money for the upper end processors... but I usually choose to buy the low to mid range model solely due to economics and let my knowledge of overclocking turn that hundreds of dollars cheaper piece of (the same) silicon into the high end chip or beyond. It's the same thing as a person who buys a 911 to go fast versus someone who modifies a cheaper car (not a pinto mind you) let's say an Rx8 or a G35. Both can achieve the same level of performance but it takes expertise, trial and error, and sometimes a little scientific method to do it effectively.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I remember finding a hidden overclock mode on one of my graphics cards. I think it was an NVidia, but I'm not sure.

[AgentZero]

Despite my misgivings about overclocking (that was me who posted about the fire, and I know it's an extreme case, if one person can find one other person that's happened to, I'll give you a lot of money), I haven't any issues against it, aside from one thing: I know absolutely nothing about it. Well, I know what it is, but that's as far as my knowledge goes. I might one day spend a couple hundred euro on a cheap system that I can tinker around with and learn about overclocking on, but I'm not going to risk anything on my €3,000 system.
Especially because when it comes to computers, I am the embodiment of Murphy's Law. If you ever see a review or a note on a website saying 'Some users experience [insert something negative here]', you can be pretty much guaranteed that I'll be one of those users. And that, in a nutshell, is why I ain't gonna be overclocking this system.
I have enough knowledge to assemble a system, and I'm willing to spend a bit extra so I know all I have to do is assemble it correctly and it'll work.