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Comment by junaru | Hacker News Reader

> If you run computing hardware at its thermal capacity for long periods of time, this will cause more wear on the parts than if they are run well inside their limits.

How true is this actually? Personal anecdote is an I5-2500K overclocked to 4.6ghz with budget aftermarket cooler (its at 4.6ghz constantly regardless of load). It's been running 24/7 in my desktop since 2011.

When will it fail? I see these disclaimers all the time and they sound logical, but does anyone have some numbers on these fail rates under these 'prolonged extreme loads'?

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Generally the time under load is the factor that kills parts, not just time on in general. For example: components that are constantly used for test benches to run benchmarks that pin them to 100% performance constantly will burn out much faster than your case.

Also, CPUs can get "binned" where you get the best CPUs in a batch which usually result in increased longevity and higher ceilings on overclocking. People usually call this the "Silicon Lottery". You may have just gotten lucky in your case and won the Silicon Lottery. That's honestly an impressive overclock for that CPU.

I've personally never had a component burn out before I want to upgrade it either, so I'd take that common "disclaimer" with a grain of salt. I think it really comes down to if you got a good bin or a bad bin part with any component.

> How true is this actually?

There's a nice write-up here[1]. To summarize, using the Arrhenius equation as an approximation, one roughly gets that a 10C increase in operating temperature leads to cutting the expected lifetime in half.

However this is a rough approximation and does not consider various other failure modes, such as those associated with thermal cycling.

It also does not really matter much when significantly below the rated max temps: 2000 years cut in half is still plenty...

The take-away seems to be that operating continuously near the max rated temperature can have a significant effect on expected lifetime. Also extreme thermal cycling is probably not a good idea either.

[1]: https://www.electronics-cooling.com/2017/08/10c-increase-tem...

I've been running a I7-6700K on a 120mm AIO radiator for three years. It gets loud, but it also smashes my OC results.

Personally, my biggest worry is the pump failing, and not the fans.

I used AIO for many computers, but every single system failed. It was the pump every time.

I switched to a Noctua passive cooler that I've used throughout motherboard generations (Noctua always releases a cheap kit to attach it to the latest socket type) and it has never been a problem. Thermals aren't a lot worse; I used it on 200W TDP 10 core SKUs, and on normal consumer chips. It has never let me down. AIO seems like a total waste to me; lots of moving parts to die on Saturday morning and make your computer unusable all weekend.

My AIO has been running fine- but I'm seriously considering a beefy heatsink next go-around.

Last time I checked, a consumer grade CPU has expected lifespan of 20-30 years, so your CPU is still in its young adult years

The rough date you checked will be relevant - as CPUs move to smaller process nodes, they become more susceptible to this type of failure.

And in my experience, it's usually not the CPU itself that has an issue, but some flaky solder joint, or the BGA under a chip, just like in the Xbox 360 'red ring of death' era. With mass-manufactured products, if you got a device from a batch that was a few percentage points out of tolerance, the thermal stress can cause issues more quickly than if you didn't introduce the thermal stress.

Probably in 20 years. The rasperry pi will probably fail in 100 years. Checkmate fan.

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