SWTOR Damaged My i7 2600K

Short story short if you have proper cooling no game can damage your hardware.

Sorry, I've got an i5-2500k overclocked to 4.4GHz and it never gets hot while playing. Check your cooling solution or lower your overclock.

"Hey guys. i've got an i7 3960x, overclocked to 5 ghz on stock cooling and its throwing errors everytime i run a game.

It must be the game causing this!!111"

I take it that's what's happening here.

My i5 runs at 5 ghz, and it BARELY reaches 60 degrees under an extreme burn in test over 24-48 hours.

But... What's to say that overclocking all that time playing Battlefield 3 and Rage isn't the cause, and SWTOR was just the last game you played to push it over the edge? I'm also not disagreeing with you that SWTOR pushes systems either. I have a 2500k and dual 460s in SLI and it clearly takes all you got to render a game that looks far inferior to BF3 and Rage for sure.

However, I think the moral of the story here is that overclocking, even when it's done with parts they clearly say you can overlclock with is STILL very risky. I just recently started to bump up my 2500k to 4.2GHz and I really don't see the point, I'm only doing it because I can, and I'm not seeing any great leaps and bounds by doing so. Chances are I won't be for long, because I want my parts to last.

I think the thing is companies WANT us to overclock the stuff now days, because they KNOW it will lesson the lifespan of the products, and if they die, then we spend more money on new ones. Plain and simple, I believe those are the underlying facts here. I mean really Intel was against this for eons until the K series. Why do you REALLY think they did it? At the end of the game making money is the name of the game, not giving us what we WANT or need.

Graphics cards are built to withstand much higher temperatures than CPUs. My old 5770 was built to run comfortably at +100. Stop trying to generalise that all GPUs are the same.

Looks like your overclock wasn't stable to begin with or the CPU degraded due to overclocking. It happens, it's one of the side-effects and risks of overclocking the CPU well past it's specifications. Some CPUs may be able to sustain a high overclock for years, others will only last for days or weeks.

It's always a good idea to run stability tests like Linpack, Prime95 64 bit, etc. over at least 48 hours to test the stability of an overclock. But even if it passes such tests, the CPU may not be 100% stable in other situations.

It's likely that your CPU has become unstable and was about to fail anyway and it has nothing to do with TOR, except that it may very well tax the system more than some other games.


On a side note, since I've seen you're running SLI, TOR is known to cause TDR driver crashes, system lockups and blue screens of death with SLI enabled (as detailed on the Nvidia forums). It's a good idea to disable SLI for TOR until the issues are fixed (set the SLI compatibility bits for the TOR profile to 0x00000000 using Nvidia Inspector), as the lockups can cause HDD corruption among other things. Of course, you'll loose performance doing that, of course.

Bsod 124 = unstable vcore, more specifically Sandybridge related

My 5ghz 2500k get 44c in swtor and just under 80c after 16 hours of prime 95

I had the same issue a few days ago. I was getting regular BSoDs, which eventually contributed to the death of my HDD due to corrupt data. I've since moved on to using my SSD as the primary boot device with an external HDD for anything else.

On my 6870, I noticed I was getting temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius, which wasn't an issue in the past. With SWTOR, however, I would begin to crash, and it would occur during browsing (I manually set my fan speed to 70%-85% during gaming, and often don't turn it down till I leave the computer). My fix was to disable shadows, antistropic filtering, and lower the grass/tree quality. My GPU has since been running at 46-48 degrees. No crashes thus far in SWTOR or outside of SWTOR.

I've been overclocking and tweaking PC's for 20 years and from what you described you are suffering data loss and corruption from an unstable overclock.

TO THE OP:

While it's great that you can play those other games overclocked and not have issues, I can also tell you that MMO's don't function the same way as FPS or RTS games and that your issues are overclock related.

With your overclock enabled, run 24 hours of Memtest 86+, if you pass that your memory side of the OC is fine and won't need voltage, speed, or timing adjustments. If it fails, you need to slow it down or crank up the volts (but don't exceed 1.6v on your voltage or you'll nuke your processor). If you throw red, you've been corrupting your data slowly until it's gotten you where you are now.

Then boot into windows and run 24 hours of Prime95 x64 on torture test. If one or more cores stop working during the test, your processor side of the overclock is bad and you've been corrupting your data this entire time, until it got so bad you BSOD.

After Prime95 x64, run 8 hours of OCCT Linpack. It will push your processor temperatures through the roof, so be ready to shut the system down as it emulates a full load and if heat's the issue, this will find it (I ended up going to a Noctua DH-14 to pass my OCCT Linpack).

Then, run OCCT GPU Linpack, as it will do the same thing and identify issues in your cooling on your cards.

If you fail any step of that process, YOUR OVERCLOCK IS UNSTABLE AND NEEDS TO BE FIXED.

It took me over a week to get my current overclock stable, and I had to go so far as to tweak GTLVREF lane voltages to stabilize the system.

Good luck.