[ The PC Guide | System
Optimization and Enhancement Guide | Overclocking: The Dissenting
Opinion | Should You Overclock? ]
Ethical Issues
No, I am not going to preach to you or tell you that overclocking is illegal, immoral
or fattening. :^) It's your hardware, and your choice about what to do with it. But I will
raise a couple of points to those few people out there who want to take risks but don't
want to accept responsibility for their actions. The point is simple: when you buy
hardware it is intended to work in a particular way. If you choose to use it in a way
other than what the manufacturer intended, you should be willing to accept the
consequences of your actions.
More specifically, I refer here to people who tell others that they should try
overclocking their machine, and if anything is damaged as a result, they should return the
hardware for warranty replacement. This is flat out unethical, and may even be illegal as
well (I'm no lawyer). I'm not going to say that if your processor croaks after
overclocking that the "PC Police" will be able to tell and won't honor the
warranty, because to my knowledge there's no reliable way for them to prove that you
overclocked. You probably can get away with sending back a chip for warranty repair
after damaging it in this way, but you have to look at yourself in the mirror each
morning...
In a similar vein, if you overclock your machine and have problems with your operating
system or software crashing, or your video card misbehaving, or errors on your SCSI disks
connected to a SCSI host adapter in an overclocked PCI bus, at least have the decency to
try undoing the overclocking and see if the problem goes away, before you waste time
calling for tech support. Most companies won't even think to ask about whether or not you
are overclocking, because such a tiny percentage of the overall user community even thinks
about doing it.
 Next: Conclusion: When Overclocking Makes Sense, and When It Doesn't
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