I'm new to overclocking. Help!

[cdfreelancer]

I have never bothered with overclocking until I discovered that someone managed to OC their athlon xp2500+ to a 3200+.
I think that's pretty cool! Even better, I get my grubby hands on a 2400+ next week and like the idea of overclocking it but have a few questions first:

1. Is it risky?

2. Do I need special equipment?

3. Does it sometimes overheat if it's been OCed?

4. Does it reduce the life of the CPU?

And anything else I forgot to mention.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Praetor]

1. Like everything else, yes
2. Short of a good motherboard, some decent/good ram then no
3. It always overheats.
4. Technically yes but by the time it "dies" the chip will be long obsolete (of course this rule doesnt apply if you burn the chip out)

Rule 1: Go slow
Rule 2: Test thoroughly
Rule 3: Get good cooling

 

[Praetor]

The Intel's survived getting their heat sinks taken off, the AMD's fryed

There's truth to the proof there but it's not absolute. I can almost get a complete boot before the BIOS kicks in and kills everything .... 'sides, who's gonna be running without a HSF (without the intention of either honest experimenting or to support stupid AMD/Intel arguements)

My friend bought like 5 AMD processors and MoBo's there is only one left, because the heat sinks were too small, and the fan failed, when the fan it overheated.

Damn near every single one of the AMD mobos ive dealt with has overheat-->kill circuitry ... even a cheapo ECS board has it ... odd that it didnt kick in for him. As for the fans .... I've never had a fan fail ... ever.... and of all the people I know who deal wit hardware, only one of them has ever dealt with a case of a fan failure..... it's not THAT common of an occurance.

Be careful AMD's are not very stable.

Eh?

 

[smadge]

i dont know much about overclocking. im dumb. it sounds too risky to me

 

[Praetor]

If you're not into OCing then you shouldnt have to worry about AMD/Intel as, for average Joe users, both chips will perform well