Most of the really fast computers are overclocked. Does this shorten their life?

Thanks,

Heavytiger

Hello HeavyTiger ,

Welcome to the Forums

Many of the disadvantages of overclocking can be mitigated or reduced in severity by skilled overclockers. However, novice overclockers may make mistakes while overclocking which can introduce avoidable drawbacks and which are more likely to damage the overclocked components (as well as other components they might affect).  - From Wikipedia

This Link is a very interesting to Read regarding to Overclocking

They say that if you Modify & use it above the normal Speed,  Ware & Tare will also Speed up

 

Hope it Helps ,

Marcus 

It depends how you define 'life' If you mean the CPU and mobo, I bought mine 2 years ago and I've just bought a replacement - PC changes move that fast. As long as OC lasts that long, it's OK in my book. An exception might be business critical solutions. I'd avoid OC there, pay more and jump for Extreme server PC products.

For OC, you really do need to know what you are doing in a big way. Popping a CPU or expensive graphics card(s) could be a big event.

The boring areas like cooling, thermal management and stress testing are the most important to get right. Take a standard shop PC, load some OC software, Windows runs like lightning, 2 hours later after a long render on Studio with your CPU maxed out 100%,your PC could have crashed and burned!

If you think you might want to get into this, do a lot of research first and get the right hardware in every sense. OC will be limited by the weakest component.

Lots of information on overclocking here. Type overclocking in the search box and enter.

Dan

Most have problems just getting Studio to work on their PC's without having to resort to deleting files the application generates as workarounds. When a poster asks for a solution to a problem, they rarely know what's really in their machine or how it's configured, beyond a list of parts. Overclocking without care could just put in another loop of uncertainty. A glitch on a PC OC'd for a game may be just that and a few frame flashes on a monitor, but it's a ruined piece of work if it's your edited movie and wastes a lot of time.

The real problem is Pinnacle software seems to need an 'oilcan' to work and doesn't cope with the many different software and hardware setups past, present and future which it can encounter.

If you run it on a PC with hardware that's too slow or under resourced, it should slow down and tell the user, not keep running for hours during a render and crash out. But, it is supposed to run on MS Windows platforms and you can't blame anybody for thinking the App. should run just like any other program sitting on their desktop.

 

Voxmagna is dead right, OC will expose the weakest component on your system but I will have to say that the mobo seems to me the most important part of the OC process. I would say the first step is to get some testing tools to push the CPU to max usage, then check the temp. on the components. This will give you an indication if you need additional cooling.

 

Oh and by the way, the only thing that will shorten the life of a component is the amount of heat generated by it. If you use good cooling solutions the life of the component should not be shortened (depends on how much you try to push it I suppose).  But remember OC is not for everyone. if you dont know what you are doing its best to first get as much info as possible on it and then systematically start with small increases.

Rux you are dead right.

The problem I fear is people will take a stock shop PC and think that OC is just a few software tweaks. I learned years ago that often when you buy a shop PC it looks OK on their specs at first, but when you look harder there are price/performance compromises. They don't expect you to run it at 100% CPU load for long periods in the middle of Summer when you are making your holiday movies! Even your Q6600 cpu comes in 2 flavors - one more desirable for OC than the other. I've always avoided OC in the past. I've now used these people in UK for a couple of things. They aren't the cheapest, but their customers are OC gamers, they are very helpful and they carry PC components which others have pushed to the extreme. Word of warning to others: There are Ebay sellers selling PC's & CPU/mobo combo's that often have odd (higher) cpu frequencies which make you think they may have a later gen. processor, when it's an earlier overlocked part.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/

I've stuck with Asus mobos the last 3 times. My current  work in progress is a P5K-E, which unlike the other mobos, is literally sprouting heatsinks and copper heat pipe on Northbridge and other CPU chips.

OC is not for everybody. I build my own computers. My fav MB are MSI, Asus & Gigabyte. Settle for an Intel E6750 instead of a quad core. This CPU is rated 2.66 but I OC to 3.2 & I have been running it for the past month without any problems. I don't need to OC my Nvidia 8800GT. My HDD 750Gb & 500Gb are having 32Mb cache. I monitor the temp very closely using an utility that comes with the MB esp when doing long rendering.

You can't just get a Dell & OC - you will get an OD. 

lol, yeah that's right. unfortunately the fact is that this is where pc shops make their cash. They will sell you a Quad Core cpu with 2GB pf RAM. but it will be stuck on a motherboard that just meets requirements. This is not good for OC, you need to research and research a bit more when buying a pc to OC. Like Voxmagna mentioned even with my cpu the Q6600 there are two different steppings. I had to make sure I get the one that runs cooler. So do your research.

best brands for motherboards i would reckon is Asus, MSi and Gigabyte. They have tools (on some models) already built in to accommodate OC.

 

Reason I got the Q6600 as aposed to one of the E series is simple. Quad Core processing. which the E series can not do seeing as it only has two cores. I have to admit the Q range works faster than the E range on Studio and on CS3. I think these were some of the first applications optimized for Quad Core processing. pity there aren't more.  

 

One last thing, the NVidia 8800GT rocks, couldn't be happier with my GPU. great price, great performance.

Pulling the thread topic back to 'reliability',  Overclocking isn't just simply running some software and putting in new numbers. The PC has to be built with all parts having extended spec. and adequate cooling, even some special selection. The factory default specs like the Dells, assume  a mass market spec. for computers that aren't running at max cpu for hours on end. They are built to a keen price and if you aren't buying the server products, there will be a weakness somewhere running processor intensive applications.

With present chip technology, high clock speeds and multiple chips (cores) produces more heat. Heat is the biggest factor affecting reliability. As speeds go up, every other component is working faster too - memory, mother board chips, graphics adapters, power supply.

This is why Intel launched their new 45nm chip series like the Q9450., it goes fast but produces less heat and can use Intel standardCPU heat sinks making it more consumer friendly. Unfortunately, it's not the best cpu to overclock.

As Rux says, you need to know what you are doing with overclocking, When done properly with all key components properly rated and not too much 'accelerator pedal', reliability could be better than an off the shelf PC for video rendering.

I may be off the wall here, but it sems to me that video codecs and rendering functions might best be done by a dedicated hardware card, rather than keep using a clumsy PC - average to good for most things, but not Excellent for realtime video processing and effects rendering. 

any recommendations on a external encoding card Voxmagna? I know the blackmagic cards are good, but they are a bit pricey and not readily available in South Africa. any other brand you mite recommend?

Like you, I've been looking, but realtime HD hardware codecs which have until now been sold and priced for the pro production industry or broadcasting and are out of our affordable price range.

However, I feel It isn't just codecs that we have a problem with.  Video editing and particularly HD, has moved from the pro workstation application in an edit environment to home consumers and it seems to me that rendering video in software is where the present bottleneck arises. I may be wrong, but I put this down to reliance on GPU and CPU in 'Do anything' design for PC's.

What I'm looking for is a company like Avid or Sony to form an alliance with a big PC GFX card manufacturer like nVidia to offer an 'affordable' hardware card solution to rendering video (particularly for AVCHD) which may not necessarily be DirectX based. Unfortunately, unless consumer editing becomes a big market such hardware cards will be way too expensive. I worked with some of the very early Avid PC products for Rec.601 editing on PC's 8 years ago, and I'm sure they produced dedicated cards then. However, I suspect the vid software vendors are relying on PC's getting much faster than they are. At the moment, hardware specs for realtime rendering in Playstations and X boxes is way in front of what PC architecture can do.

Sorry this reply is a bit off topic, but overclocking todays PC's isn't the best solution and the energy overhead to work with AVCHD is still too high, despite Intels best efforts with new C2Q processors. AVCHD is the worst thing to happen for home energy bills, whilst MPEG2 chipsets are now high volume and relatively cheap to put into cards and PC's. Things might improve once we've gone through the pain and expense barrier to establish MPEG4 in broadcast and consumer products.

..and here's a 'Blast from the Past':

http://www.planetdv.net/Content/By%5FManufacturer/Pinnacle/

 

rux:

 

Reason I got the Q6600 as aposed to one of the E series is simple. Quad Core processing. which the E series can not do seeing as it only has two cores. I have to admit the Q range works faster than the E range on Studio and on CS3. I think these were some of the first applications optimized for Quad Core processing. pity there aren't more.  

 

 

Sony Vegas has been multi core capable LONG before studio or CS3. In fact you can control the individual cores in Vegas Preferences. 

As for OC'ing, it depends on what equipment you have. The Q6600 OC's very easily to 3Ghz, but you do have to watch the temps, and it's a real double-edge sword with memory. You can OC to greater speeds with slower memory but then the slower memory will adversely affect your speed as well. Anybody can OC a CPU in between 250Mhz and about 600Mhz or so with stock equipment and you will see a benefit, but after that you have to start paying attention because of the increased heat and various bottlenecks that will have adverse effects. For example, It's quite easy to OC a cpu by 2 or even 3 gigs but not see any additional work coming from it.

Gains from overclocking memory are reported to be relatively small in percent terms. If you start altering cpu clock and bus frequencies not knowing what you are doing, you could hit the memory ceiling first and think it's the CPU that's at the limit or blow up the GFX card if you haven't taken care of the PCIe bus speed. What's important for me is how Studio rendering times might be improved and that would be in my benchmark test. As others say, the performance of Studio will depend on how well it's written for quad core cpu's and the operating system being used.

Here's something for fun to show just how overclockers do things, and this guy isn't refrigerant vapor cooling the CPU and GFX chips:

http://eazyvg.linuxoss.com/2008/04/08/overclocking-q6600-with-p5k-e-and-nvidia-8800gt-reaching-for-40ghz/

 

I just built my AVCHD box - A C2Q6600 2.4ghz overclocked to 3.55Ghz running XP32 SP3, on a very large air cooler. It took a day of reading, Google and tweaking to get it running stable under benchmark and stress testing with some more still to do.

Here are some results for rendering Our Backyard Circus (1206 frames, running 48 seconds) to a disc image file:

AVCHD best quality: 111 seconds or 2.3 times realtime. So my 40 minute HD vids with simple transitions and effects shouldn't take more than 1.5 hours to render and I can get them done without leaving the PC running all night!

DVD High quality: 26 seconds or just over half real time.

It's sheer processor horsepower that's needed - the higher the clock rate the better.

Overclocking does work if you know what you are doing and spend a lot of time on thermal management, but this will do me until Intel bring out some better faster chips I can afford, running half the power.