How long is it safe to run an extremely overclocked rig?

[No1Spank]

I've only been playing around a couple of weeks but have started to suss out how to tweak various settings in increments to gradually increase performance.

Saturday I spent the afternoon playing with an Athlon ii x3 440. I managed to get a lot of benchmarks to run with almost 4ghz on the clock which I was quite pleased with as I don't take the voltage past the point it changes colour in the bios (about 1.437v).

 

Anyhow I was just changing some settings as it refused to run on Pcmark05 when it shut off and wouldn't fire up. I chucked it in my old board which runs ddr2 and found that it will only run properly after I leave the bios in single channel memory mode with 1 stick of ram (I tried ganged mode). I'm guessing I damaged the northbridge when it was running at about 2600mhz.

 

I think I could move up the ranks with other kit I have but am scared to crank up the volts even with sorted cooling. If I decide to say run my FX 6300 with 1.6v how long can I run it before doing damage?

 

If I shut it off for half hour after every run to cool right down would that be safe?

 

I might get into extreme overclocking one day but need to learn basic stuff like this first before I cost myself a lot of wasted money.

 

Thanks in advance

[Leeghoofd]

Sometimes we run on the same setup for over 6-8 hours man under LN2. On air it's far more easier to kill stuff as things tend to heat up and you have to be more subtle with voltages... With extreme cold all you need is proper insulation and bench hard

[Calathea]

Sometimes we run on the same setup for over 6-8 hours man under LN2. On air it's far more easier to kill stuff as things tend to heat up and you have to be more subtle with voltages... With extreme cold all you need is proper insulation and bench hard

 

I don't know man, some stuff (not really a lot though) has for sure degraded or passed away on ln2/dice for me, nothing on air/wate yet. Don't think failed delids counts lol. Condensation is a bitch

[No1Spank]

Thanks for your help, that CPU was bought by me 2nd had 2 years ago and has always been run overclocked (not that I use it a lot) since so maybe it was degrading and I just pushed it over the edge.