Overclocking = massive overheating, which is why they sell liquid-cooling systems and huge elaborate copper tubing heatsinks with massive fans etc....

Went Electronics in Vocational back in 1977, bought my first C64 a few years later, and switched to Atari 1024STE then to PC,
Electronics that are made to run above specs = hot electronics and hot electronics = dead electronics.
built a speech synth for my c64, synced 8 rack synths using my atari 1024STE, and scrapped by name-brand PC and started building my own from scratch.

Why do you think they sell Laptop coolers? Not because they're overclocked, but because "hot electronics" = "Electronics with a short lifespan/dead electronics"

especially chips, and cpus, there's already a Massive heat sink on a CPU and you can actually Burn yourself touching a heatsink on some CPUs
electronics getting that hot was unheard of back in the day, and even today, the longer your cpu is hot, the less time it's going to last.

So overclock to squeeze an extra half-gig out of a cpu, cut the life of the cpu in half, and spend twice the money on a cooling system, rather than just buying a cpu that could do that speed without overclocking.
that's what I'm saying.

Buy a car that can go 120 mph in 4th gear with your foot to the floor and kill the engine in half the time, or buy a car that can go 120 mph in 5th gear with the accelerator half pressed.

Meh, I'm off topic anyway.... :/

My Core 2 Extreme laptop has been overclocked since June of 2008. When will it die?

Btw you realize that cutting a CPU's life in half means it's still got a good ten plus years of service, right? And that it will be obsolete long before it dies?

A modern Intel cpu is easily overclockable to 4Ghz. The fact is there are none on the market that are rated at this speed, so we can't just buy a faster one if we want that extra performance. As you can see here overclocking a 920 to 3.8Ghz, a $30 cooler (Cooler Master 212 Plus) is actually cooler than the stock Intel cooler at stock speeds. So I have a faster cpu that runs cooler than the stock Intel clocks, all for $30 more.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/19383-cooler-master-hyper-212-plus-cpu-cooler-review-10.html

With a 2500k, many people reach 4.5 with low voltages on the same cooler, and at lower or equal temps compared to the stock clocks.
http://www.overclock.net/t/968053/official-the-sandy-stable-club-guides-voltages-temps-bios-templates-inc-spreadsheet/0_30

Overclocking is not a bad thing, unless you don't know what you are doing.

I hit 5Ghz on my i7 2600k, idles around 34C and maxes around 65C on average. (Prime95 for a few hours will bring it up to ~75). I find overclocking enjoyable. Hitting 4.5Ghz was so easy on the Sandybridge i7's on stock voltage.

Overclocking video cards can net you up to 10-14FPS more in some games with a small overclock.

Don't even need to change voltage much or at all to get a really nice boost. I have my HD5850 at 850/1200 for gaming, only tweaked the voltage up a tiny bit. Never crashes. I can crank the voltage more and get 950/1300, but that does crash occasionally so I avoid it.

I used my poor ol' i5 750 stock for a while to save power, but now that I'm doing F@H all day anyway I wasn't saving any electricity. So I went and overclocked it again. I used to do 3.8 GHz because it was rock stable and I couldn't get 4 GHz to work, but now I'm at 3.9 GHz without issues so maybe I should try for the round number again.

Put some IC Diamond thermal paste on my GTX460M (for a grand total of $5), overclocked it about 25% and my temperatures are still better than stock. And this was with a laptop . . . GPU not CPU, but you get the point.

I've managed to overclock my 2600k to 4.4 GHz (I could go higher, but why) while maintaining a max temp of 69C while running Prime 95 (11hrs blend) on an after market cooler (air). The odd thing about that is that if the temps I've seen posted online of people using water cooled systems are accurate, then my temps on air alone are better than those at a comparable oc ...of course that may also have something to do with me using a HAF 932 Advanced tower... man that thing blows air like there's no tomorrow.

I find it's almost scary just how easy it is to overclock an i7 cpu. Can't say that I've ever tried oc'ing my GPU though, I think I'll just leave that one be.