04-01-2009, 10:24 AM
I'd recommend the advice of those who say "if you need to ask questions here about how to overclock, then you are not ready to start overclocking". Overclocking is a skill which has to be learnt, by studying then by practicising what you've learnt, on the way picking up things like choosing components for your next computer which are more likely to overclock well and buying things which will help overclocking them.
Running an Athlon XP at a constant 85-90 degrees (I assume you mean Celcius) is a very bad idea. Although Athlon XP CPUs can tolerate higher temperatures than most CPUs, its life expectancy will be seriously reduced, plus it will be far more prone to random often undetectable errors. Using such a chip for work purposes is a terrible idea, as all the work that is being done on it has the potential to be (possibly almost invisibly) flawed all because the computer's CPU has an incorrectly installed heatsink or non-functional fan on it-- something that could be fixed very cheaply.
Some chips can tolerate very high temperatures fine. I had (note the *had*) a usable GeForce 6800GT whose fan totally seized up. I was able to continue playing games with it fine even with it reached it's thermal protection temperature limit (where the driver automatically halved the graphics-card speed) of 135C. It lasted for several months like that before suddenly suffering almost total failure (meaning I couldn't even reach the PC's BIOS boot-up screen successfully most times).
The hotter you run things, the sooner they'll die. But provided you know what you're doing (or if pushing things to or beyond the limit know it will probably be dead in at most a few months instead of lasting potentially a few decades), then overclocking can provide a bit of extra performance out of CPUs, graphics-cards, and the computer's main-memory (the latter is arguably the most difficult of the three to get right and yields the smallest gain, even with the likes of tools such as Memtest86 to simplify testing, and with most modern chips you'll be doing it whenever you overclock the CPU unless you effectively underclock the memory first).
Running an Athlon XP at a constant 85-90 degrees (I assume you mean Celcius) is a very bad idea. Although Athlon XP CPUs can tolerate higher temperatures than most CPUs, its life expectancy will be seriously reduced, plus it will be far more prone to random often undetectable errors. Using such a chip for work purposes is a terrible idea, as all the work that is being done on it has the potential to be (possibly almost invisibly) flawed all because the computer's CPU has an incorrectly installed heatsink or non-functional fan on it-- something that could be fixed very cheaply.
Some chips can tolerate very high temperatures fine. I had (note the *had*) a usable GeForce 6800GT whose fan totally seized up. I was able to continue playing games with it fine even with it reached it's thermal protection temperature limit (where the driver automatically halved the graphics-card speed) of 135C. It lasted for several months like that before suddenly suffering almost total failure (meaning I couldn't even reach the PC's BIOS boot-up screen successfully most times).
The hotter you run things, the sooner they'll die. But provided you know what you're doing (or if pushing things to or beyond the limit know it will probably be dead in at most a few months instead of lasting potentially a few decades), then overclocking can provide a bit of extra performance out of CPUs, graphics-cards, and the computer's main-memory (the latter is arguably the most difficult of the three to get right and yields the smallest gain, even with the likes of tools such as Memtest86 to simplify testing, and with most modern chips you'll be doing it whenever you overclock the CPU unless you effectively underclock the memory first).
CPU: Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (2.2GHz @ solid 2.53GHz)
GPU: nVidia GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (not currently O/C)
Memory: 2GB DDR400 (2x 1GB @ DDR422 2.5-3-2)
GPU: nVidia GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (not currently O/C)
Memory: 2GB DDR400 (2x 1GB @ DDR422 2.5-3-2)