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what causes instability?

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wayne

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when overclocking, what causes instability and what do you guys mean by instability?...is it like overheating at certain points causing it to shut donw or something?

please help me because i may be overclocking soon and i m decidng on whether stability or overclockability is more important to me in the decision for buying a motherboard
 
which is more important: stability or performance?


that ought to be a pretty easy question.... do you want to stress your computer components? do you intend to upgrade from them within a year? then why not overclock? however, do you want to keep your components for several years? do you want them to stay stable for a long time to come? then dont overclock.

it's fairly simple. i dont overclock cause i'm a cheapass and wont be upgrading for at least another year or 2.
 
If properly overclocked, the lifetime of a part should not been noticably endangered.
 
Originally posted by wayne
when overclocking, what causes instability and what do you guys mean by instability?...is it like overheating at certain points causing it to shut donw or something?

please help me because i may be overclocking soon and i m decidng on whether stability or overclockability is more important to me in the decision for buying a motherboard
Click to expand...

When I overclock, what I consider instable is my system rebooting or freezing by itself when I play games, run a cpu demanding software etc... such has Hot cpu tester etc...

You should be able to overclock to a certain point that you will not compromise stability. It should not be a question of overclocking or stability. I think both can be achieve, and that the purpose of overclocking. What would be the fun to have an overclock system that you cant used because it's not stable ?

When Overclokcing, search for the higher overclock, when you reach an instable point, step down a notch or two , and stress test your system to your satisfy need.

All motherboard are stable, if you buy a mobo and it's not stable, return it. Now, not all mobo have overclocking features. Do a research, or specifiy what type of CPU you have or will have, and let people make you suggestion from their past experience.
 
For buying a mobo stability should be one of the most important parts of your decision. If you have the cash you can get one that is good in both being stable and one that will OC well.

If the board is unstable is useless. Instable is when it freezes, reboots or does random/odd things that it shouldn't.

Usually caused by OCing. I never worry about the life of a cpu or anythign from OCing, the stuff will be well outdated before it dies of old age.
 
Originally posted by YARDofSTUF
Usually caused by OCing. I never worry about the life of a cpu or anythign from OCing, the stuff will be well outdated before it dies of old age.
Click to expand...

Amen.
 
which is more important: stability or performance?
Click to expand...
i m not sure as of now because i need to know how stability is determined first...thats why i started this thread in the first place
 
overclocking doesnt mean you'll lose stability. unless you're doing something wrong.
 
overclocking to a reasonable amount does not decrease the life of your components as long as you have enought cooling to compensate for it. the general rule of thumb for chips is beyond a certain point every 10 degC will decrease the life by half.

last time i heared intel and AMD cpus were made to last 20 years or so.

so say you have a p4 2.4 that does 3.2 with stock heatsink and runs stable (never crashes at all unless its a bad soft that you can crash at non OC speed) say the oc raises your temps 5 degC
then you would loose a bit of life.

But if you want it to last as long as it is supposed to then you can get better fan/heatsink and keep it as cool as it is supposed to be. remember they know that computers not owned by enthusiasts get filled with dust and so on. a non overclocked CPU with a lot of dust on the heatsink must still work (up to a point) so there is not a lot of warranty calls. but it will be a lot hotter than an overclocked CPU owned by someone that knows how to look after their stuff.

Prescot in its current incarnation is a whole nother matter when used with mobos designed for northwood. They use too much power for those boards even if they are supposedly "approved" just wait for a proper mobo or get AMD which are now the power saving champs..who would have ever thought it! i used to be worried my house would catch on fire with AMD( :D ), but my bf server runs 24/7 on AMD without a hitch
 
When one is testing the stability of the system (raising the fsb) until it freezes/ reboots. Is there a chance of it messing up the current instalation on the harddrive? What do the hardcore overclockers do if this does happen? Do you have images of the installation?
 
Originally posted by MN Scout
When one is testing the stability of the system (raising the fsb) until it freezes/ reboots. Is there a chance of it messing up the current instalation on the harddrive? What do the hardcore overclockers do if this does happen? Do you have images of the installation?
Click to expand...

Yes there is a chance of messing harddrive data. In short, when you raise the fsb you raise the PCI bus wich the IDE is one. So it' overclock your ide controller making corruption. Now most recent motherboard have a PCI/AGP lock option in the Bios wich allow to lock the frequency to 33/66, or as near as that. This way you avoid corruption on your HD.
 
Originally posted by camay123
Yes there is a chance of messing harddrive data. In short, when you raise the fsb you raise the PCI bus wich the IDE is one. So it' overclock your ide controller making corruption. Now most recent motherboard have a PCI/AGP lock option in the Bios wich allow to lock the frequency to 33/66, or as near as that. This way you avoid corruption on your HD.
Click to expand...
does the IC7 have a pci/agp lock option in the bios?...i m planning to get one
 
IC7 has AGP lock. I have the IC7-G and it has it as well.

Stability is being able to stress your system (say, running prime95 or gaming for prolonged periods of time) and the system won't just up and crash or reboot, or doesn't BSOD. Also, random restarts can be a sign of instability (like when your memory is running at too high frequencies or has wrong timings, etc).

I have my system at 3.0 Ghz (just bothered to OC it to that today), it's passing memtest and prime95 up till now.
 
Originally posted by camay123
Yes there is a chance of messing harddrive data. In short, when you raise the fsb you raise the PCI bus wich the IDE is one. So it' overclock your ide controller making corruption. Now most recent motherboard have a PCI/AGP lock option in the Bios wich allow to lock the frequency to 33/66, or as near as that. This way you avoid corruption on your HD.
Click to expand...
isnt overclocking the ide controller gonna make it operate faster?... like faster transfer rates or something?...anything??
 
its best to keep those frequencies stock so there's no compatability/corruption issues.
 
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