Moderators: Guru's, The Ministry
Not a good analogy either really. A car engine (unless it's used for racing or similar) will not spend a lot of time producing more than it's original output. It is certainly unlikely to run faster for most of the time. But thrash it and it may well break!SkippyBing wrote:The car running on 4 star analogy is rubbish to be honest. Run a car on 5 star and you can advance the timing further without pre-ignition, this will allow you to run at higher revs/compression thus getting more power which is why the RAF saved up a reserve of 100 Octane pre the Battle of Britain to get extra performance from the Merlin. There will be more mechanical strain on the engine because it's running faster and producing more power.
True, but it's life will be shortened. Although it's unlikely to be shortened sufficiently to interfere with the useful life of the part anyway. Permanent damage might not be done, but novice overclockers had better be familiar with CMOS resets and know their best BIOS settings off by heart before getting too cocky!SkippyBing wrote: Run a chip faster and err.. it's nothing like that. If a chip will run faster then it'll pretty much do it for life, the rating is based more on what the manufacturer can guarantee it'll run at reliably rather than any physical limit. As Intel and AMD are conservative on chip settings most can be overclocked, there's no physical strain on the chip per se it's just a question of how much faster you can run it before all kinds of quantum effects come in to play and electrons start merrily hopping onto the wrong circuit. You'd have to massively overclock a system to damage it.
I'm running my cpu faster then one that costs near £1000 and I paid a quarter of that for it 
