cpu degradation

[Magic Carpet]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2468/6

Wondering if this has seen an update... especially since Intel introduced the K series of the chips.

Surely, it is difficult to measure something over such a long period of time. Your thoughts?

 

[sm625]

I've had an E6600 running at 3.2GHz for almost 4 years now. All I can say is that when I push it to 3.3GHz, I get the same exact type of prime95 failure I got 3 years ago. It fails one of two worker threads after 10 minutes of running. If there has been any degradation then I would have expected my chip to fail at a lower fsb, or at least to fail sooner at the same fsb.

 

[Arkaign]

Volts are by far the most crucial factor in premature CPU death. More or less if you're running near stock volts with decent temps, you can expect the thing to live far beyond it's useful lifespan.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Yeah, I have one p3 1.4 running as a NAT box for nearly 10 years. That gigabyte board doesn't allow for any OC though.

There should be a movie made "Volts are Rising". Could be phun!

 

[dbcooper1]

Volts are by far the most crucial factor in premature CPU death. More or less if you're running near stock volts with decent temps, you can expect the thing to live far beyond it's useful lifespan.

+1

I've seen far more motherboard degradation over time than CPU over the years and on various systems. Capacitors and MOSFET power related items degraded by heat/high current.

 

[bononos]

Volts are by far the most crucial factor in premature CPU death. More or less if you're running near stock volts with decent temps, you can expect the thing to live far beyond it's useful lifespan.

How long approximately is far beyond useful lifespan? 5/10/20 yrs? I've got an old win2k box which I'm still using.

 

[sangyup81]

Volts are by far the most crucial factor in premature CPU death. More or less if you're running near stock volts with decent temps, you can expect the thing to live far beyond it's useful lifespan.

Seems to be more so with Intels. I've always abused my AMDs volt wise without any issues provided I could keep the temps down

 

[BrightCandle]

My i7 920 C0 when brand new would do 3.8 Ghz with HT and 4 Ghz with HT off running at 1.35V. That was a decent overclock from the stock setting at a relatively modest voltage that should allow it to run 24/7 for a long time. I do run a custom watercooling kit that keeps it below 60C and normally below 50C.

After nearly 3 years its now down to 3.8 Ghz without HT (not tested with HT in a very long time). I started getting instability after 2 years and I had to knock off 200Mhz to make it stable (and twiddle the other voltages a bit). Interestingly I couldn't reduce the 1.35V core voltage at all despite coming down in clock speed.

In the last 9 months however it hasn't dropped any further. It will likely survive until SB-E or maybe IB turn up. Its done well considering its age, and the motherboard unlike all before it has also been solid the whole time. Its been by far the most reliable system of all of them built and its pretty heavily overclocked.

 

[ther00kie16]

The silicon definitely does degrade. I don't have enough knowledge in materials science but through personal experiences, a x2 that was fine undervolted to 1.000V for 3 years all of a sudden started experiencing occasional BSOD due to low voltage and had to be bumped up .025V. Same thing with my laptop. And there are plenty more cases of GPUs dying because of their relatively high operation temperatures compared to CPUs. And as a member showed through experimentation, higher operation temperature leads to more power consumed due to current leakage, which I would hypothesize to be related to degradation of the semiconductor over time.