Overclocking?

[Garry Russell]

I think it's when it break down completly and it's taken if as a non booting up machine

Garry

[Quixoticish]

This all depends on what kind of overclocking you do. I've always overclocked, and I've had duff CPU's but they've never been flagged up as overclocked and have always been replaced without issue, both with retailer RMA's and when they've been sent back to both Intel and AMD.

I think it depends on how sensible you are. If you're doing a moderate overclock on your standard cooling, and are conservative on how much you increase the voltage then no, they can't tell. If you burn the CPU out by whacking the voltage up then obviously they will be able to tell, but it isn't worth their time or money to spend hours and many thousands of dollars testing your CPU to determine if you've overclocked, they will just issue a replacement order and you'll be fine.

To be honest modern processors are of such a high quality that most don't need a voltage boost to give them a modicum of stability, since the Athlon XP series I've been happily overclocking with no increase in voltage whatsoever and everything has been rock solid stable on a variety of intel and AMD systems. As long as your RAM is up to the task of running at a higher FSB you generally won't have any problems, and it's nigh on impossible to destroy anything just altering the FSB (unlike tinkering with the voltage). Worst comes to worst and your system doesn't boot you simply short the CMOS reset jumper and everything is restored to normal.

[Trev Clark]

What confused me, was the fact the programmes to actually do this overclocking (not that really say that, they give it a fancy name) is AMD themselves. One for the ATI card and one for the AMD chip itself. Why would they release something that will cock up your hardware?????

[jonesey2k]

These programs usually have an "auto" function that determines the optimum settings and can usually be a bit conservative.
I've always been a bit dubious about messing with the CPU settings within windows though.

Just a few tips when clocking video cards, if you see white sparkles all over your screen in 3d use then the memory is getting too hot so back it down a bit. If you see weird geometry flashing about like grey or black triangles then your core is overheating and you need to back that off. Very rarely you will get a card that clocks so high that it just crashes, it needs more volts to go higher but these are quite rare and you'd have to mess about with flashing it with a modded BIOS or hardware voltmods... well beyond where I am prepared to go

[SkippyBing]

I think AMD release the program to get more points with the hardcore modding crowd. I mean they're going to do it anyway so if you give them a nice utility to do it with it may get you a few extra sales, as they probably developed the software for in house testing anyway it likely didn't cost them any extra to release it. I'm guessing it's unsupported as such.
Another tip for overclocking, on a lot of the new nVidia cards the they don't notice if you increase the PCI-E bus speed for clock speed reporting purposes even though they actually are running faster. E.g. reports it's running at 625MHz a with a bus speed of 100MHz, if you increase the bus to 125MHz it'll still say 625MHz as it's multiplying the bus by 6.25 it just assumes the bus is running at 100 (the default) so it's actually running at 780MHz. Which explains why mine really didn't like doing anything clever for a while!

[Chris Sykes]

The only OC'n ive done on my new PC is to set the RAM speed, and the timings to its correct settings. Also now adays a lot of manufacturers actually have a set limit for OC'n, for instance RAM manufacturers state that their RAM will take a certain overvoltage before warrenty void.

[steveamsden]

Surely this just means you get a lie in at the weekend??