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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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