Quote Originally Posted by Lenny_Nero View Post
There are 2 sure fire ways of killing a CPU*, well any electrical component for that matter ...heat and voltage, well 3 if you want to count hitting it with a hammer as well.
As for the AMD specs I am sure the they have room for the cheepo main boards and PSU's that dont have a very stable hold on the voltage and send loads of ripple and odd order harmonics down the lines. So there is almost no doubt that a small over voltage, as long as the running temps are not pushed up will cause any problems. In fact I am under volt'ing mine (its been hot and running very long jobs without me around) and still getting ~2.4 GHz. I normally run at 1.38 to 1.4 ish (depending on what does the reporting) and that is happy to keep my 4200 at 2.6 video encoding for weeks on end, and I know of people that are happy to run at above 1.5 on air (most with optys) but TBH all they do is play games and the like so its not a big deal if there is a big spike in the supply and the chips get toasted. That said, I think its worth getting a good PSU to help smooth the line, the poster above 'd1b1' looks as if a no name PSU is getting used and I am surprised that they have done so well with it so far, the power supply is a very underrated piece of kit dont skimp on it.

I have seen some people put 1.7V thru but I am not even going over 1.5 with my chips because I use my computers for a long time, but there is some sort of myth that chips ware out with use it does not happen. I have 30 plus years with computers and my dad started working with them in the late 1950's and has never heard of a chip that just get worn out, they dont, there will always be something else that caused the chip to fail see above*

If the process goes quite a few orders of magnitude smaller the life might come down from 10,000 years to 9999. But I still think that most people will want to upgrade before they have used 1% of their CPU's lifespan.

I agree, but you have to keep in mind that the hardware is rated from the manufacturer in longevity under certain thermal exposures. The higher the duration of high thermal exposure, the shorter the life expectancy for any piece of silicon will be.