OTOH, it also depends on *why* you want to OC - what is your purpose in achieving an OC?
For me it is getting more out of my hardware - without taxing it. I have been reading long and hard, and I purposefully bought equipment that will yield decent over clocking with a minimal of effort. I have spend literally the last couple of days reading about it and I have successfully overclocked my CPU and memory by 25% each (C2Q 6600 @ 3.0 GHz and RAM at 500 MHz, Linked / synced FSB 1333.
Thus far it is definitely running hotter (CPU, all cores by 10C, which means more heat generation which means more heat in my room - and it is just about summer here, with temps in the 90s F for the last 3 days and counting)....but my performance is much better already.
I am going to take my memory a bit farther, and see if it can get it to operate at the rated 1000 MHz it is supposed to, and see if that will help me get a better WEI score but also see if this memory I bought is really worth it or not....
My motherboard and RAM both have lifetime warranties, so I am pretty sure that eVGA / OCZ will RMA anything that goes bad if I don't go insane and blow it up manually.
But drom is right - it is not easy, and you have to be *very* careful on what you're doing or else you'll blow something up, or fry something, or start seeing random lockups.
Plus, it consumes more power and generates more heat (which then adds to your power consumption in other ways, such as room cooling), so unless you can afford it, don't bother.
