heat and crashes

[CTho9305]

When an OC'ed computer crashes, what actually causes the crash? Not enough voltage for something, or too much heat? How does it happen?

 

[GFORCE100]

Heat, exceeding hardware abilities, using poor quality RAM etc.

 

[Zephyr]

what happens is that once you push the chip too far the flaws in the die interrupsts the currents flowing around in the core. By upping the Vcore you can make the currents "skip over" these flaws like electricity can "jump" from one piece of metal to another.
However more Vcore reprents more energy being moved which by the laws of physics also means more heat being produced.

This is why I find AMD's upcomming SOI technology fascinating.. here you "shoot out" the flaws in the silicon to allow for much less Vcore to be required for operation and much higher clockspeed achieveable. If it works like it's supposed to I'd say it can do quite a bit for the yielding of cpu dies.