Maximum PC

Hi all, I'm trying to figure out what the dangers of overclocking are and how much it may affect performance. I just put together a PC with an i7-3820 chip. I have a Corsair H60 cooling system on it. I know absolutely nothing about overclocking but managed to figure out in the BIOS that simply changing the CPU Strap from 100 MHz to 125 MHz overclocked the chip from about 3.6 GHz to about 4.5 GHz (actually varied up to 4.625 GHz). Some of the voltages went up a bit when I had changed that setting.

I ran enough benchmarks (an hour's worth) to stress the CPU and everything seemed stable. The results I was getting were in line with the 25% increased clockspeed, being between 120 and 125% of the benchmarks originally.

CPU temperature never got above 59°C and that was VERY brief - it generally hovered between 40 and 50°C.

My questions, are, first, did I actually do this properly? Or is there other stuff I should change when overclocking? Second, I had been told by a few people that overclocking will affect some of the work I want to with this computer. It's NOT for gaming, but for work-work (computations, data analysis). Is that actually true?

I've found overclocking to be more for bragging rights these days than for actual system performance unless you're really running CPU-bound tasks. If you have a really good video card, games top out at lower-end processors. And your OS or other 'casual' activities don't even need what we like to put in our computers these days.

With that out of the way, you only have one danger: life span. My EE colleague tells me for every 10C you put in the part, you lose half its lifespan over time. If you overvolted the device, it's even more true. But this may be a moot point. You're probably going to replace the part entirely before it dies.

Thanks for the reply. Apparently I don't have my settings properly configured since I didn't get an e-mail when you posted ...

Anyway, this is for work, really. I'm actually running some code right now that's going to take 19.75 hrs (based on previous benchmarks). I'm running two instances of it, so it's using 2 cores, and each is occupying a 20.5GB VSIZE of RAM and varies between 17.5 and 20.3 RSIZE (I have 64 GB RAM). If I were to overclock my i7-3820 by just changing the CPU Strap to 125 MHz, then I could save 4 hours and then go on to the next image to run this code on.

The cooler I have is a Corsair H60, so I guess that would be classified as "intro liquid cooling"?

In terms of replacement frequency, I'm coming at this from a Mac side where I bought my first desktop for college in 2001, replaced the CPU in 2006, and replaced the tower in 2008. Still have that one as my main machine for non-work. Laptops replacement cycle for me was first in 2002, then 2005, then 2011. So I'm not really sure how quickly I plan on replacing the CPU in this, though since it's for work it'll be a tax write-off.

I was thinking maybe going with every-other Intel chip release, though I'll have to see what the benchmarks are when Intel comes out with their Ivy Bridge LGA 2011 chips in maybe a year.