First build - Need advice and opinions

[Slick82]

Originally Posted by CroSsFiRe2009

Heat, power use and the potential for decreased lifespan of the chip are acceptable reasons, instability and random bsods etc from overclocking are not and are signs of unstable, bad oc's.

Agreed, though I still retain doubts about it, especially in terms of the Twin Frozr 2's from MSI. Despite the dual fans and 4 heat pipes and 'safe' overclock, some are on their 3rd or 4th RMA with those cards, and the NVIDIA support forums are littered with artifacting and crashing bugs from people with factory overclocked cards. A few managed to eradicate it by turning up the voltages a bit, but it still begs how long that stability will last.

In terms of CPU overclocking especially, rather than throwing money at aftermarket heatsinks and thermal pastes it'd be more economical to just buy a new CPU by then :)