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The main cause of system instability or damage that arises from overclocking is poor cooling, because increased operating speeds produce higher thermal loads. The excess heat must be adequately dissipated, usually by means of a heatsink combined with a forced-air fan cooler. To know whether or not your system is being cooled sufficiently, you must monitor its operating temperatures.
Most quality motherboards permit onboard temperature monitoring through a variety of sensors mounted in strategic locations. The most valuable sensor point is underneath the base of the processor inside the socket interface (if there is one) or adjacent to the processor on slot-interface boards. Some architectures offer an additional layer of security by embedding a thermal sensing circuit in the processor's die substrate layers. A chipset or third-party circuit then actively monitors the hardware, passing temperatures and other relevant data to the CMOS for analysis and display on the BIOS Setup's user interface. Software applications can also extract temperature data from the sensor circuitry and move it directly to the operating system for real-time monitoring.
Most motherboards that offer thermal monitoring also support user-defined temperature limits to safeguard against damage to the processor and other components. Suggested maximums vary with processor designs. Exceeding temperature limits may trigger a warning or cause the system to shut down. Although stability problems can occur, even at low temperatures, you should avoid exceeding 60° Celsius when overclocking any current generation processor.
Maximum recommended operating temperatures for a variety of processors can be found in Chapters 5 and 6. Just as you should establish a performance baseline when benchmarking your system, you should also establish a processor or system case temperature baseline before overclocking. Of course, you can be quite confident that processor and system case temperatures will increase when your processor is overclocked. Instability will not necessarily follow increased temperature, but it is important to know where your system started out. Such knowledge will make troubleshooting easier down the road.
Overclocking tends to be a trial-and-error process. The more data you can gather about your system, the better. If an overclocking attempt is successful, in the sense that the system remains stable, you can record the processor's temperature during that attempt. If you later overclock your processor to a higher speed, and that produces instability, you'll know what temperature to seek via improved cooling to improve stability.
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