question about Dangers of Overclocking/Overvolting VS speeds

[neilencio]

1. Okay, I've already did some googling, and I already read about the effects of overclocking in regards to heat

2. I also already know about the effects of electromigration on the lifespan, and its relation to increasing the vcore voltage

I managed to overclock my 2.50 ghz e5200 to 2.9 ghz by increasing the FSB to 950 mhz. That's the only setting that I touched, the rest are on default. DDR2-800 RAM is unlinked and still runs at the default 800 mhz speed, the vcore is untouched from the default setting and from what I've seen with CPU-Z, it currently fluctuates from 1.04 to 1.2, it maxes out at 1.24.

Temps reported by Speedfan is okay, it seems. Temp1 idles at 30C and goes up to 40+ under load (basically I was running PCSX2 and NullDC at the same time), Core 1 and Core 2 idles at 34-38C and goes up to 40+ under load, highest I've seen is 51C (same programs running, after 30+ mins of play).

I have speedstep enabled so the core speed is usually at 1425 mhz.

So my question is this:

I'm not overvolting my processor, nor am I reaching alarming heat levels, they're actually only a degree or so higher than when I run the cpu on stock, and with speedstep I'm actually running at speeds lower than the default (1.4ghz vs 2.50ghz)...

...am I still effectively reducing the lifespan of my processor or am I good to go? I'm also curious if I'm risking my motherboard (it supports up to 1066 fsb so I would assume 950mhz fsb is not a problem?)

[DerekG52]

From the sound of it, you *should* be ok, but always take that with a grain of salt. By overclocking you are accepting that something *could* happen. I would suggest running Prime95 to test system stability while verifying temps throughout the process. If you can run the test for a number of hours and are happy with your temperatures and core voltage, you should have a stable system.

Is the multiplier locked on your CPU? From what I've read/done, most overclocks typically start by raising the multiplier first then adjusting the FSB.

Since it sounds like this is for running emulators, have you measured the performance increase?

[neilencio]

The multiplier is locked at 12.5x with my board so I can only overclock by increasing the FSB.

I'm going to try Prime95 later, as far as performance increase goes, I just tested with PCSX2, I think I got a huge speedup, since a game that only ran at 48-61 fps before now reaches 90fps (the game in question is DBZ: Infinite World).

[DerekG52]

That's a very good increase, I haven't tried PCSX2 in a while, got really bad performance before, but I recently bought an AMD X3 720 and radeon 4890.

[neilencio]

PCSX2 is a really weird beast as far as optimization goes. Speeds are very game specific, instead of type of game (I mean, you would expect that simple cel shaded fighters would run faster than heavy textured games with lots of busy screens, but there are cel shaded fighters that run like molasses while a similar one runs fullspeed, and the same goes for 3D type games).

...and the biggest speed increase I got with the program is when I changed to a 64 bit OS. I used to not be able to run things at fullspeed using a 32 bit OS, but when I installed XP 64bit, I get fullspeed on some of my games without changing any settings. Same hardware, same everything.

[DerekG52]

That's good to know, I think I was using 32bit xp at the time. When I upgraded I moved up to Win7 Ultimate 64bit (release candidate), I'll have to give that a try. I'm also trying to setup decent n64 emulation on my htpc, but goldeneye has been the big hiccup holding it back.