Overclocking wear and tear?

[mrnoobie123]

Has anyone ever experienced overclocking wear and tear??

For example i've been running a q6600@3.8ghz for a few years now (though it's never significantly over-volted <1.45v or overheated <60C). When i started overclocking it, i could run prime for 8hr+ and it was always stable.

Fast forward a few years and now I can't run prime for 1 hour without bsods even though all the bios settings are exactly the same as it were a few years ago. There's also no major change on the hardware side except i replaced my 2GB ram with 4GB although of same make, model, and timings. I noticed that I can stabilize the system at the cost of more vcore than what was needed before... so is this a classic case of CPU degradation?

Oh, I should mention I switched over to windows 7 but I don't think I heard of anyone else needing more vcore to run a stable win7 machine vs XP/vista or did they?

[Hameister]

I'm no expert in this area, however, if everything is exactly the same as it was a few years ago and now the CPU requires a little more voltage to maintain the same stability it once did, I would say yes, it does sound like something has changed within the CPU. Did you Google this to see if there is anything on it?

[mrnoobie123]

Thanks for the replay Hameister!

I did google the problem and someone else on the hardocp forum was in a similar situation. I didn't know know if it was coincidence or not, but the guy almost had an identical setup (cpu & mb) and he was ALSO switching to windows 7! The guys on that forum were debating whether it was drivers or electromigration but there really doesn't seem to be any general consensus or solution (though it would be odd if it's drivers bc increasing vcore DOES solve the problem).

In the mean time i just lowered my speed to 3.6 since increasing vcore for 3.8 makes it too hot. Anyway, I'm surprised google didn't have that many finds on the issue that's why I'm wondering if any other long time OC'ers ever encountered this problem? My guess is most people either don't keep their setup for more than 2-3 years or they don't bother to re-run stress tests after 2-3 years to really notice a problem.

[Hameister]

I'd say your analysis of the situation is most likely accurate. Curious phenomenon. I'll check back here to see if anyone else has anything to say about this.