Will over-clocking kill my comp?

[Rockin Robbins]

Professor Lexandro speaks the truth! If you have outdated components, buying memory and CPUs is too expensive. Make the leap to present generation and save some cash while making a much better system. If you're upgrading a previous generation system, as I said earlier, make sure the components you buy can migrate to the new. With CPUs and memory that isn't possible and you end up overpaying for an inferior product.

And Professor Lexandro is correct about overclocking. It is a question of temperature and the money you are prepared to invest to keep that temperature in a range that will make your components last longer than you would use them anyway. Some shortening of life is tolerable, like making your CPU last five years instead of seven. What CPU would you want to use seven years from now? None! So you haven't lost anything by a modest shortening of its life.

If you by beefing up your cooling system achieve the same or nearly the same operating temperatures for that component as you had before overclocking, it will last a similar length of time. Your casual overclocker often fails to take these factors into account and that spawns a lot of horror stories. But that is good, because it scares away people who shouldn't really be attempting to overclock their systems anyway.