What is overclocking?

[ComputerScott]

I've been hearing the term overclocking a lot lately. Although I get the general idea, what exactly is it? And what are the pros and cons?

[sweeper2]

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-over...w=overclocking

[Ultima]

To put it simple:

Overclocking is making your components run faster then the intended or designated speed that the manufacturer set them to.

That applies for cpu, ram, chipset and videocard mostly.

The pros are:

Your system will run faster then it did, to what extend depends on what and in what way you're overclocking.
If you have an Athlon64, you can only overclock by upping the HTT bus, which means that the entire system will speed up, because you will make the chipset run faster, giving it a greater throughput and if you run the memory synced, you'll get greater bandwidth from that too.

The cons are:

Your components will produce more heat, so more cooling is generally required.
Supposedly it shortens the liespan of your components, but seriously, most if not all overclockers will never have that rig as their main rig for more then a few years, and so, I think that's not really viable.
And ofcourse, your system can become unstable and make windows crash if you don't overclock correctly.

[vikeor]

what ultima said

[DeathWish187]