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[Vieo]

I've never overclocked anything (too scared to) in my life, but I've been wondering about it. What determines how high you can bump up the stock clockspeed of a CPU? Is it the heatsink?

For example, if you could keep the temperature of a CPU(let's say a P4 at 3GHz) at 0 degrees F/C no matter what you did to it, how high could you push it's clockspeed?

If someone invented a heatsink that could do the described above, would they make millions?

 

[Hooker]

It's all about stability.


The cooler the chip, the more stable it can be at higher clockspeeds. It will stop being stable at one point, and that has more to do with the architecture of the chip.

Even with phase coolers (CPU cooled with liquid nitrogen etc.) you cna't push a processor as high as you want. You will get insane overclocks, maybe over 75% but the stability is gone