Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands

[LowPolyOWG]

The 3rd party manufacturers (EVGA, MSI, Sapphire) tend to overclock their GPUs by default

[PZ]

I'm glad you're enjoying the game, nex 

Do post some of your memorable experiences - I've not played in a while, but the game is in my mind quite a bit 

[nex]

The 3rd party manufacturers (EVGA, MSI, Sapphire) tend to overclock their GPUs by default

Mine is a MSI, by the looks of it the card's running on standard and not overclocked, I've never tried overclocking so I'm a bit reluctant to try   

[LowPolyOWG]

If you compare them to reference models by Nvidia/AMD, the 3rd parties usually have higher clock rates. Yeah, I wouldn't try, some games might crash and your  PC might become a fire instead

[nex]

Yeah, I'm very familiar with that, toasted a cpu once, forgot to put paste on
That was many moons ago......

[Art Blade]

I think the same. I've had several pieces of hardware that were supposedly great for overclocking or even "meant to be" overclocked but I've never done that. And I never had hardware failures (except once but that didn't have to do with overclocking)

[fragger]

I've always been wary of overclocking. Make any kind of machine or device run faster than it's supposed to for any length of time and you can pretty much expect problems to develop.

Nex's story reminded me of the time I tried to remove the heat sink from the top of a CPU - for some stupid reason I can't remember - while forgetting that it had been pasted to the CPU as well as being held on by a pair of securing levers. So of course it wouldn't immediately come off after I'd lifted the levers. Believing it had just gotten stuck down a bit over time, I applied a bit of force. It came out, and ripped the whole CPU out along with it

On closer examination I could see that I'd bent about half of the CPU's pins to varying degrees in the process. Assuming that I'd reduced the CPU to junk anyway, for a lark I levered it off the heat sink with something non-conductive, straightened out the pins as best I could with a pair of needle-nosed pliers and a desktop magnifier, then put it back into its socket with the heat sink simply levered back onto it, with the dry remains of the paste still in between. Then I tentatively switched on the machine, prepared to quickly unplug it if it did anything untoward like catch alight or go bang and erupt in a shower of sparks or something

After all that (plus having had my statically-unprotected bare hands all over it), it worked perfectly In fact it ran for a couple more years until I got a whole new machine

[LowPolyOWG]

  At least you were lucky that the motherboard survived. Thermal paste dries up over time. OC-ing requires some stable voltage settings and a PSU that can handle it. Otherwise, you'll have a dead PC.

[Art Blade]

better than a dead user

[LowPolyOWG]

 

[nex]

Something similar happened to me fragger.
About a week into my training I decided I have learned enough to upgrade my 286 machine to 386.
I remember it was an AMD cpu because Intel was only for the rich people.
I was very excited about this new blistering fast pc I'm gonna have, but then I ran into a glitch,
the frigging cpu doesn't wanna go in, and my daddy didn't give me big hands for nothing so I "put it in"   
Eventually when I started up the pc it was as dead as a door nail.
Checking that everything is where they supposed to be I noticed the cpu wasn't in properly,
that's when I discovered cpu's can only go in "one way", any other way the pins tend to bend. 
Three of the pins were bent, I carefully bent them straight with a very small pair of long nose pliers.
A few years later I gave the pc away when I built a new 486.   

[Art Blade]

nice

Kind of reminds me of a small LAN party several years back. Someone's PC had been taken apart and they wanted to put the stuff back in again, only the memory banks wouldn't go back in. One of the guys offered to lend a hand. He was obviously having a hard time squeezing that thing in and when he finally managed, they switched on the PC. Suddenly a horrible stench filled the room, of burnt chemicals and burnt plastic and all that, and the PC went dead the same instant. Everyone was around the case, opened it and one guy finally noticed, "he put in the memory alright, but backwards." The owner's face turned from white to red and when they wanted to talk to the genius, he was nowhere to be found. The rest of the afternoon was basically a lot of cursing and how that idiot coward had just disappeared in silence, no backbone, incompetent, how he could dare offer a hand when he didn't know what to do and all that. Needless to say, the LAN party had died with that PC.

[fragger]

People who slink away to avoid facing the music over their mistakes are so spineless, especially when they do it to those who are supposedly their friends

[LowPolyOWG]

How do you put in memory backwards? Damn, what a horror story, Art 

[Art Blade]

that guy wasn't a friend of mine. And if he had been, he wouldn't have been after that. Yeah, it was bad.

How to do that? I'd say it wasn't really "backwards" but like this: imagine looking down at a memory bank where you have a line of brass tongues sticking out on one long side, looks a bit like a comb or a piano keyboard, and that line has got a left and a right end, the line pointing away from you. He flipped over the bank so you still had that line pointing away from you but now left and right were on the opposite sides. So when squeezing that thing in, it wasn't "right fits right and left fits left" but "right doesn't go in left and left doesn't go in right" -- yet he forced that thing in, anyway.