[johnklos]

If you put your foot to the floor in a supercharged car, you're going to eventually have to let it up lest you melt things or you burn all your oil because your rings aren't making contact with the cylinder walls any more. It's an apt metaphor since the same is true of CPUs. You can't run a CPU at 400 watts continuously for more than a handful of seconds at a time.

The problem is that Intel has normalized it so much that all their high end CPUs do this, and apparently do it often. It's not unexpected that they might be too close to the point where things are melting, so to speak.

I'd rather slower and more stable any day - I chose a Ryzen 7900 over a 7900X intentionally - but that isn't what all the marketing out there is trying to sell. The fancy motherboards, the water coolers, the highly clocked memory all account for lots of markup, so that's what's marketed. I'm not a fan.

It is worth noting a distinction between the terms "overclocking" and "turbo clocking". "Overclocking" has traditionally meant running the clock "over" the rating. "Turbo clocking" is now built in to almost every CPU out there. One technically can void your warranty, whereas the other doesn't.

Since we're mostly technical people here, we should use the appropriate term where the context makes that choice more accurate. It's like virus and Trojan - we SHOULD be technically correct, but that doesn't mean highly technical people aren't still calling Trojans viruses now and then.