How Not to Overclock Your CPU, a ‘How Not to' Guide from UFD Tech

Seeing as it’s Friday, let’s me share something a little bit light hearted. There are plenty of ‘How to’ guides out there which show you step by step how to improve a PC’s performance, but today we came across a video from UFD Tech which takes a rather different route. In order to prove the point to his viewers that it’s actually quite hard these days to overclock your system to the point where it breaks, he decided to do ‘How not to’ video. It’s certainly true that most modern platforms have built-in fail-safes that stop you from actually configuring the CPU to the point where things get damaged. Nonetheless UFD successfully demonstrates that if you are determined enough, it can still be done.

Overclocking can be a scary thing for many people, especially if you're delving into it for your first time. Here's a quick guide on how quickly you can mess things up and burn out your PC. This is a warning of what not to do, not a how to video.

He starts off by selecting his ‘sacrificial lamb’ – an ASRock 970 Pro3 motherboard with an AMD FX 8350 processor, an octa-core Vishera chip with a default of 4GHz and a TDP of 125W. After explaining the relationship between frequency, voltage and heat he then pushed the CPU voltage to a pretty unhealthy 1.55v with CPU frequency of 4.2GHz. Under stress that means his VRM components start reaching beyond 160 degrees Celcius. It’s at this stage we wish we had smello-vision technology. Death is imminent and arrives on cue with a wimper.

UFDisciple, to use his HWBOT handle, is admittedly not the most experienced overclocker. However he did win the HWBOT Amateur World Series 2016 South Africa contest last year. In this video, if nothing else, he has proved that killing your PC with an overclock takes plenty of effort. You can find his video here on his UFD Tech YouTube channel.

You can discuss this post in the HWBOT Community Forum here.


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