TECH Thinking about upgrading

[Los]

thinking about overclocking my cpu to a cool 3.5 (wolfdale 3.16 stock) but had a problem where i had to replace my motherboard because the 650 motherboard with four gigs of ram would crash for some reason. i have 8 now. should i attempt it? i dont want to buy another motherboard yet... because i'd have to get another processor and then i'd just get a new video card and i don't really want to spend that kind of money yet.

 

[thekraft]

You're welcome to try it, if you've never done it before, but chances are, you won't notice much of a difference.

 

[Stilgar1973]

As long as you are not completely stupid about it not much harm should come from it.
You may want to consider a backup of important data before attempting it.
(reason being, if the CPU does go haywire the first thing it is going to do is corrupt data)
Depending on your resources you might even find it to your advantage to carve a partition off a hard disk and set up a dual boot. If you ever get to the point that you are so happy with the OC that you want to run it 24/7 you can always blow away the new partition.

As far as fear of hardware failure goes, the trick is to take it in tiny little incremental steps. During every step measuring temperature changes and looking for corruption and blue screen.

Proper preparation, incremental steps not much bad is going to happen to you.