What are the dangers of high CPU voltage?

Question

I have a i7 6700k Skylake and I have her overclocked at 4.7GHz with 1.7V. I've seen people saying that you should be wary of putting the voltage over 1.5V, but they all seem to be related to core temperature. I have a really good cooler and just now when I ran a stress test at 4.7GHz 1.7V it didn't get over 55C. Is high voltage a problem if you can keep the temperature down?

Solution

The conductivity of a semiconductor is depending on it's temperature. By increasing the voltage the free charge carriers move faster and collide more often with the grid.

So by turning up the voltage, the conductivity increases, more currency can flow and the processor gets hotter. Even if your cooling system keeps the overall processor temperature low, single capacitors can still overheat and blow.

Your processor will not get any faster by increasing the voltage, although this might be necessary, if you're increasing the frequency. The optimum would be to keep the voltage as low as possible, but as high as necessary.

Comments

[Admin]

While your cooler may be able to keep the overall CPU temperature low there may well be very localised hotspots within the CPU die. You could be damaging small but specific areas of chip and the damage may not be immediate or obvious. How long the CPU lasts will be determined by how "perfect" the CPU die is. It is impossible to say for certain that keeping temperature low is the only factor in how long the CPU will live, but it was designed to work at a particular voltage and higher voltages can cause unexpected damage to circuitry not expecting that voltage.

[sawdust]

"So by turning up the voltage, the resistance increases" -- Wrong! The resistance is fixed in the circuit. The current is what changes.

[Corbie]

I partly agree. Semiconductors behave different than metals. I will respecify that.