ok i.m fairly new to overclocking cpu and gpu but i m wondering what makes them crash? BSOD, shutdown ?

Question

i ve seen people overclock using liquid nitrogen since pentium 4 days so i was wondering if your pc is cold enough then you can overclock really high or am i missing something?

Answer 1

It's not so much the overheating.



What causes instability is errors which in turn causes corrupted files. The O.S. detects the errors and then it will shut the system down. The reason it shuts the system down is to ensure the O.S. does not become corrupted.



If the CPU or GPU is not getting the correct amount of voltage, it will cause the CPU or GPU to generate errors. I've had top notch cooling on my system when I overclocked but if the CPU or GPU isn't stable then it will BSOD, freeze, or just flat out shut down. In these cases my CPU temps were in the 60's. Excessive heat can cause the CPU or GPU to become unstable but these days a CPU or GPU has built in protection that causes the processor to throttle until returns to a normal temperature. Also, modern day processors are built to withstand higher amounts of heat. So you can run a CPU in the low 80's for a long period of time and it will be totally fine. Server processors are built to withstand prolonged periods in the 90's.

Answer 2

Overclocking can cause your CPU or GPU to overheat, or generate data errors.



If they overheat, the computer will do an emergency shut down to prevent any damage to the hardware. Even if you use liquid nitrogen, that's no guarantee that the processor can run stably at such high speeds. One problem you always have is if the processor is not waiting long enough for data to be reliably read or written into memory. In fact most modern processors are idle a great deal of the time because these operations (even for main memory) are relatively slow. Painfully slow.

Answer 3

clocking over any spec effectively reduces the life and heatsinking makes no difference say if u imagine that a cpu is capable of running a 1200 mhz system address bus and is a dual core cpu with dual core vmm speed step os independant switch in functions thats about 120,000 binary calculations delegated per 16x16 bit logical prioritising functions thats each node on the cpu 32x32 xdual core functions clock it up to say 4 ghz from 3.4 120000x32x32 suddenly is as hot as 8 ghz one guess of intel chipsets i herard sometime was its function at abasic no scsi or other on board extras from add ins was at 100% use 100% efficiency the possiblity of failure was 1 out of every 10000 calculationsall this iis vague to be sure but thats the risk and if ur rich n can afford to buy as many new boards as you clock ovewr then go for it.its trial n error n the error is what you will face more the factors to boost are uncountable variances its a wiser idea to allocate resources manually on irq routing table and remove default options running in OS like windows linux or unix is a safer testing platform i can link u specifically to the diagnostic tool for your hardware manufacturer and many tools to do optimal system bootup just ask