Topic Overclocking dangerous???

Riddar

Ugh, my friend has a Dell Laptop which was crashing all the time lately. No warnings, no error messages, just hangs and crashes. Turns out that the cooling fan stopped dead, hasn't been spinning in weeks; any CPU usage above about 20% led to an overheat.

For what it's worth, no long term damage! But makes me think an aftermarket cooler might be a bit safer.

mmarsh

The reason there was no damage was that your motherboard automatically stops the system if heat levels rise above a certain level. The "crash" is in fact a fail-safe mechanism in your system bios that preforms an emergency shutdown preventing any serious damage to the CPU core.

As for extra cooling, its not bad idea. laptops are already poorly cooled. A little extra airflow cannot hurt. Its a bit iffy of how effective it can be because latops are designed to circulate hot airflow in a certain manner, so it depends on the circulation pattern to how effective an extra cooler can be. There is no harm, but its possible there is no real benefit either.

Riddar

In theory you are right, the processor restrains itself to certain levels to avoid overheats (and hangs if the throttling doesn't work).

But the thing is, he could be on the laptop using IE, AIM, or other low CPU activities (even Starcraft) for hours on end. The CPU isn't producing much heat, so the system won't hang, but the other components (ones without inbuilt sensors) that are part of the air channel must have been cooking nicely. He got kind of lucky.