How safe is it to overclock my system?

[zzohrahh]

Recently I got a gaming pc and I was wondering how safe it was to overclock. I have a ryzen 7 2700x cpu, geforce gtx 1060 3gb gpu, and a msi 470x plus motherboard. I know I can over clock it with afterburner and it works wonderfully. I have water cooled with 120mm fans and a 240m case fan I wanna say and the temp averages around 60 on ac origins with near max settings. I wanna continue to overclock to increase performance for my games especially origins but I don't want to shorten the lifespan of my gpu or cpu drastically. if anyone has any advice on my set up and overclocking it that would be amazing. Currently the overclock on the gpu I was wondering was +160mhz to core clock and +200mhz to memory clock. Thank you guys I hope I explained that well

 

[drea.drechsler]

Overclocking can be quite safe so long as you don't go to extremes. Just watch operating temperature and avoid raising voltages too much to attain stability and it will still last a long time, probably well past your interest in it.

Even so, unless you do something seriously wrong (I mean REALLY seriously wrong) even operating at high temp with voltage beyond safe for extended periods it's rare that it will fail catastrophically as instead it starts going unstable where it used to be stable. Lowering clocks and voltages back to stock and it will operates normally again, even if at that reduced performance level. This is true for CPU's as well as GPU's.

There are a number of guides and you-tube videos around on overclocking Ryzen, just search on them and start slowly. As far as overclocking a 2700x: most reports I've read say it's not worth the effort. Precision Boost 2 is so vastly improved with Zen+, boosting more cores, longer and higher. It will frequently boost 1 or 2 cores higher than it can sustain an all-core overclock. Secondary threads in multi-threaded games rarely carry very much processing load so 1 or 2 cores is really all games need for the heavy loaded primary thread(s).

 

[Tyler Paul_1]

Recently I got a gaming pc and I was wondering how safe it was to overclock. I have a ryzen 7 2700x cpu, geforce gtx 1060 3gb gpu, and a msi 470x plus motherboard. I know I can over clock it with afterburner and it works wonderfully. I have water cooled with 120mm fans and a 240m case fan I wanna say and the temp averages around 60 on ac origins with near max settings. I wanna continue to overclock to increase performance for my games especially origins but I don't want to shorten the lifespan of my gpu or cpu drastically. if anyone has any advice on my set up and overclocking it that would be amazing. Currently the overclock on the gpu I was wondering was +160mhz to core clock and +200mhz to memory clock. Thank you guys I hope I explained that well

To reiterate what Drea said, there is always a risk of something going wrong however it is rare.

a frequency which is given by the manufacturer is what they could achieve safely (below temperatures with their testing)

If you have no idea what you are doing with overclocking I would seriously suggest looking at some videos before you try as not only could it break your CPU and GPU it can damage over components in your system too.

If you wish to overclock both I would suggest using coolermasters wattage calculator to make sure that you are ok on the power side.

Other than that if you choose to overclock then make sure you are aware of voltage and temperature limits of your components as they are the biggest risk of a component failure


Good luck in overclocking (if you choose to)


Tyler