your thoughts on CPU degradation?

how much of an issue do you guys think this is? i remember all the way back to the celeron 300a days and people saying upping the voltage will shorten the life which if you think about it is to be expected but i always figured if you're only going to keep that setup a year or two that you probably would never notice the life span that got shaved off of it.

fast forward to today and the smaller die processes they have where more voltage should have more impact. i have an e8400 that i started tinkering with this time last year. i got it up to 4ghz on air but i had to give it about 1.42v to get there. i never could get it 100% stable - sometimes you could prime it and it would crap out after 2 mins, other times it would run for 12hrs or more before dumping on me. the best i ever got was 28hrs straight. i was promised that the chip was capable of it but you know how it goes, your mileage may vary right? so i gave up, i don't use my pc at home much anyway as i've turned into one of those bastard console gamers. it sees maybe 3 hours of use during the week and sits mostly idle from friday night to sunday night, i say mostly idle because all it does is serve up movies to my ps3 or 360. i never played games on it except for a few months during the spring that i played quake live on the weekends and it was never folding or running prime or orthos.

so a few weeks ago i begin to notice i was having some issues. i drop everything back to factory settings and keep plugging along. yesterday i decide to fire it up with the overclocked settings and it absolutely won't boot to windows at those settings that worked fine for months, it will blue screen everytime. the ram is flawless because before i started my OC i found out what the limits were and even retested those yesterday to make sure and they are fine. evidently at some point in my testing i smoked a huge crack rock because i set the voltage up to 1.51 on the cpu core voltage and then saved that setting. so each time i booted up with my OC'ed settings i was running at 1.51v on the cpu.


i haven't had a lot of time to fine tune, but so far the best i can get out of it is 3.6. i googled a bit last night and it seems like most are calling that degradation. i always laughed at that because i figured by the time you'd notice a difference in it you'd be long done with it.

If you ran your CPU at 1.5V for any length of time then there's definitely a strong possibility that you caused some degradation. That is definitely not a safe long-term voltage for a 45nm Core 2 CPU.

yea that seems to be the general consensus from what i've read. seems that most frown running 1.4 or higher. i'm not upset or nothing, i mean hell you can't have an omelet without breaking some eggs but it sure seems like it went downhill quick to have been used so little.

1.51V is pretty high for a modern CPU. I've never had any trouble with CPU degradation due to thermals or voltage. Any overvoltage will technically reduce the lifespan, but I never keep hardware running for that long anyway before upgrading.

that was my thinking too. by the time any damage would start to show i'd already be using something newer. i didn't really think 1.45 was that high for short term use, and even though i feel 1.51 is pretty steep i wouldn't have thought it would've brought on any kind of problems so soon. a year of regular use, sure, but with the little use it's seen i'm surprised.

i'm in the process of putting water cooling on it right now and i think i'm gonna turn the voltage up and finish it off. i don't use it much but i don't trust the processor if it's got issues. that could be a long term headache waiting to happen.

Intel have said that anything above 1.36V can damage the 45nM chips.
This is dependent on cooling to some extent but pushing to 1.51V is irresponsible if you dont know what you are doing.

I have been running my E8400 at 1.4V, 4.1GHz for 1.5 years with a TRUE120 h/s and it is still fine.
I dont recommend exceeding 1.4V though as higher voltage DOES cause accelerated wear.
Do at your own risk.

i'll chalk it up to stupidity on my part. for that kind of voltage and air cooling the chip didn't run very hot. i'm no stranger to overclocking, as i said i remember the celeron 300a and i was one of the first guys on the maximumpc forums to reach 1GHz without peltiers or dry ice.

running the voltage that high was careless of me and i should've double checked my settings. more than likely that chip just wasn't going to do 4ghz and because i was told it could, i forced it with excess voltage. no more used processors though, from now on i'll take my chances with a new one.