[wordupmaking]

My takeaway from reading into these things was that at certain temperature breakpoints, lifetime decreases a LOT, way too much to want to get close to that.

So I tried to find the rough limits and wrote down idle/load temperatures for various combinations of settings/frequencies, and then picked my "sweet spot" at which temperatures started to increase a lot more per little increased performance. Granted, I did get a good case and CPU cooler, which I clean religiously, and of course there's always luck involved, but divided by the 8 years it's running this current computer is the cheapest I ever had, apart from having to replace the PSU because that was the one bit I paid less attention to, even the hard drives are still spinning, it's freaky. So the next one will have an even better case and cooling and then not get overclocked much or at all, either, that's for sure.

[strainer]

8 years is good going and Eco friendly :) When a machine is no longer the latest rocket, may as well run it cool too, except in winter if the heat is handy.