QOTD: Did You Ever Fry Your PC by Overclocking?

[Spider D]

I screwed over my graphics card a few years back. In the days of the Nvidia Geforce 6800, I bought an LE version with the express purpose of unlocking it.

I know, most people suggested using a vanilla 6800, but at the time the LE version was MUCH cheaper. I thought it would surely be the best bang for my buck.

I unlocked it's pipelines and vertex shaders, overclocked it, and then stress tested it, after I found what seemed to be stable settings. I actually got that cheap piece of second rate silicon to equal, or best the 6800GT in all areas, save for memory core. Those budget RAM modules maxed out a little bit over the speed of a vanilla 6800.

Overall I was ecstatic. The LE cost less than a 6600GT, yet here I had one which could rival the insanely expensive 6800GT!

It ran well for quite a while, but just shy of one year, it flaked out on me. Suddenly it's 3D performance plummeted to unbelievable low levels. My brother had an ATI Radeon 9250, and when I tried it out on my PC, even it's pitiful 3D power handily trashed my once great 6800LE!

I still overclock and unlock, but I never again push any hardware as hard as I did that graphics card.

 

[Gopherboy6956]

I burnt out a Intel DG45FC Mini ITX board. Too small of a power supply, melted the Southbridge. It was tragic.

 

[maestro0428]

Several, lol. 3 G4 cpus, two graphics cards, two motherboards. This was all during OCing and volt modding. Cant make a cake without breaking some eggs, right?

 

[warezme]

never by overclocking but I did fry a Barton AMD very similar to the one pictured as those CPU's apparently have not safety features.

I had a badly seated cooler in that situation.

 

[rodney_ws]

My OC'n experiences go back to the original Pentium. With little knowledge on the topic and exercising the level of caution ofa typical 16 old, surprisingly I have managed to NOT burn up anything.

 

[bboysil]

Nope.

 

[norbs]

Damaged a few from overclocking but never killed any. However...

I fried a pentium 100 back in the day, power supply connectors back then could easily be off by a pin and still fit onto the mobo; it was kinda hard to get to this particular power connector with everything in the case. anyways i burned out a CPU and i think the mobo but i can remember.

A guy at my work managed to burn out 4 systems in a row. We had a bad hard drive that actually was shorting the power connector somehow (seen two drives that have done this already) and unfortunately the ultra compact dells we use run their sata power connectors through the motherboard and not directly to a power supply. Anyways he did not learn very fast and took him about 4 computer and a sata to usb adapter before he figured out it was a hard drive. he was a genius...

 

[Caffeinecarl]

Only time I ever killed a component was when I started up an Athlon 1200 and I mistakenly hadn't clicked down the HSF. Five seconds after power on, the proc fizzed and that was the end of that! I replaced it the next day for my friend with a Duron 1300 that I picked up for $5. First, last, and only time I'll ever kill a component out of sheer stupidity. Overclocking is a different story... haven't killed anything yet, but there's always that chance!

Athlon 1200 processor: hundreds back in the day.
replacement Duron 1300: $5 last year
Learning to always fasten down the heatsink: PRICELESS!

 

[HermDawg]

I've fried a processor but only because I didn't discharge my static before I touched the CPU fan. I've been overclocking for years and haven't fried a processor from overclocking.

 

[kittle]

I never fried my own PC because I dont overclock -- for exactly that reason: I dont want to fry anything.

but i did have issues with a graphics card my brother had overclocked. it worked fine for him overclocked & cooled, but when I restored it to stock values, it died after about a month.

 

[usasma]

Yep, when pencil clocking an AMD Duron 900 mHz!

 

[joefriday]

Never fried anything by overclocking, however, I have fried a Celeron 800MHz CPU at stock volts and speed due to a fan failure. The poor guy would still boot and work for a few minutes, then the whole computer would freeze or hard cycle off. After testing the PSU and ram, it was the CPU that was the culprit. New cpu and re-secured my 5 volt fan mod, and the beast is humming again. That's the only CPU/GPU I have ever killed. I've ran across a couple DOA AMD chips, a K6-2 and an Athlon XP, and I've mildly chipped the corners of the cores on both the K6-2 and the Athlon XP (not the same as the DOA ones), but thankfully both of those still worked afterwards (yes, I took the lid off the K6-2).

 

[wolfseeker2828]

The first PC i ever assembled, I forgot to put the standoffs on the motherboard. There went $150.

 

[wolfseeker2828]

Whoops, didn't post the rest of it. It should have said that I am lucky so far in that I have not fried anything by overclocking.

 

[katmandude]

nope never actually did! guess when u're a student and money is an issue u get sort of paranoid with cooling the cpu when making like thunder with it ^^.

Pushed a 1Ghz PIII to insane levels once. mouted a 120 mm fan (from a server case) mated with 2 plastic funels to keep the damn thing cool ^^ the machine still kicks some serious butt, noisy , but very effective. (considering where it came from).
pushed it passed 1.2ish Ghz i think. At the time Ocing was sort of an on going experiment. Me, a good friend and my dad (who's an ingineer, and the maddest of the bunch).
recepie for a grilled CPU:
a) Take a standard PIII discarded for the office
b) get all the specs directly from a 'friend' at intel
c) a bit of calculations ( that's the ingineer bit) at the time i wasn't sure why mu dad was doing it, i ofund out once the machine was running... 'get the soldering post out Sonny, yer fada is gonna go bezer with the mother board...' and **sigh he did....
d) apply small wires to the Motherboard to boost the general electrical input of the system (mommy!)
e) input the OC in the BIOS

f) BURN! guess what? before Oc standard benches would give you a certain level of performance. After, with just a 20% increase on the CPU plus all those cables routing currents in the MB, we'd get 60%¨increase on the benches.... I'll get the screen shots once i demothball the pc from the attic. and yes WE DID keep it ^^

 

[katmandude]

nope never actually did! guess when u're a student and money is an issue u get sort of paranoid with cooling the cpu when making like thunder with it ^^.

Pushed a 1Ghz PIII to insane levels once. mouted a 120 mm fan (from a server case) mated with 2 plastic funels to keep the damn thing cool ^^ the machine still kicks some serious butt, noisy , but very effective. (considering where it came from).
pushed it passed 1.2ish Ghz i think. At the time Ocing was sort of an on going experiment. Me, a good friend and my dad (who's an ingineer, and the maddest of the bunch).
recepie for a grilled CPU:
a) Take a standard PIII discarded for the office
b) get all the specs directly from a 'friend' at intel
c) a bit of calculations ( that's the ingineer bit) at the time i wasn't sure why mu dad was doing it, i ofund out once the machine was running... 'get the soldering post out Sonny, yer fada is gonna go bezer with the mother board...' and **sigh he did....
d) apply small wires to the Motherboard to boost the general electrical input of the system (mommy!)
e) input the OC in the BIOS

f) BURN! guess what? before Oc standard benches would give you a certain level of performance. After, with just a 20% increase on the CPU plus all those cables routing currents in the MB, we'd get 60%¨increase on the benches.... we also got a rather noisy pc. much like a vacume cleaner on full blast ^^

I'll get the screen shots once i demothball the pc from the attic. and yes WE DID keep it ^^

those PIII where tough little cpus ^^ my 800 Mhz PIII E was also sent to CPU HELL ^^ modded with a german made cooler which replaced the cooling solution on the cartriges. looked like a Graphic card after than lol ^^

 

[katmandude]

arf ^^ spelling and mistyping.... ^^ sry peeps ^^

 

[oxxfatelostxxo]

Ive gone through a few MB's that ran for a good 6mo-1yr, seems to be about avg life i get outta most of them, before something burns out. Dont know if any is my fault or faulty MB build, but the OC sure doesnt help.

 

[Guest]

Kinda. I pushed a motherboard buss from 200 to 250 for 2-3 years and then it would fail to boot at the stock 200 let alone 250, but i could still boot at 180 before i replaced it. It started to get flaky at 180 as well right before i switched it out.

Over nearly 20 years of computers, and about 15 of overclocking stuff that the only piece that i would consider fail due to overclocking. And roughly 15 systems worth of parts.

Everything else has held up for years overclocked, some stuff ive had runing for 10 years at a high percentage overclock(i have 5 systems, old hardware finds it way to older boxes that dont need a lot of power so hardware tends to stay in use a long time).

 

[rabidbunny]

I modded an x800 gto to an x800xl through a bios upgrade. It unlocked 4 extra graphics pipelines. After almost a year, the card croaked. Luckily, I didn't have to pay to replace it.

A friend fried his 7600gs after running his 46" lcd tv on it and had the card in a HP case with almost no cooling. The capacitor blew.

 

[hepotblatic]

yes haha

 

[anamaniac]

I'm trying...
Got my nvidia 7500le to 108 celsius
I think I'm gonna try that again.... but attempt for 120.
My CPU is undervolted actually, so I think I'm fine.

 

[jsc]

First OC: 1978 - TRS80 Model I Z80 from 1.77 MHz to 2.01 MHz. Did it by piggy-backing chips, cutting PCB traces, and running jumpers.

Had a Pentium 233MMX in a Acorp motherboard. Eventually found a set of undocumented jumper settings that let me run it at 333 MHz. Fitted a S370 cooler when I did. Threw it out last summer.

The famous 300A Celeron at 450 MHz.

E6600 to 3.6 GHz. Q6600 at 3.6 GHz. Q9550 at 3.6 GHz. It'll boot at 3.8 GHz. but it's not stable.

 

[mjhieu]

No I did not fry it after 2 years full load 24/7 and it still runs good like hell now. I overclocked my core 2 quad Q6600 at 3.7ghz under water cooling. I thinks that problem is only for amd users with bad cooling devices

 

[thelvyn]

I fried a intel 386/33 cpu by running it at 40mhz. Then I had a amd486dx4/100 which I ran at 160mhz for ten years till I finally gave it away which just goes to show each chip is unique. Made a good router. I fried a 512mb dimm when I was overclocking my athlon slot-a/500 cpu. Saw this flash of smoke and when I looked you could clearly see where it arced out from the dimm to the FIC-SD11 motherboard. I promptly replaced it with the same MB and it lasted for years. It was cheap ram... Cpu was fine thankfully
I also lost a psu once the wall socket was wired wrong, reversed the polarity... Idiots.

Nothing in the last couple of years though.