I have to disagree with you mark, When Asus brought out the A8N SLI, We had two faulty ones and a large number of people reporting instability issues, in fact the complaints on this motherboard had reach about 5000 in the first two months.

WHY.. Well getting the first thing on the market is esential when every one is waiting for it. Asus Rushed out there motherboard a full month before most of the other manurfactures did. Plagued with issues and has had serveral BIOS updates to make the system stable. The other makers of the boards had NO issues.

Overclocking hardware (when done by a pro) is not stressing the hardware. I know that alot of processors are built to the higher end specs, if they fail a test then they a clocked down and sold as a lower grade CPU.

Most hardware has a 20% tolerance which can be applied. the faults that people do is cause to much heat by over volting the systems or having a badly cooled system.
When you look at locked pipes on a graphics card, these are acomplished simply and they are inplace so they can sell that upgraded chip on a budget to keep the market prices up on the high end kit.

After many years of running overclocked hardware I have never had a fault, I have seen alot of stock system have a failure: a Hard drive wil break with or with out a clocked system.

When costs are considered - I paid 1/6 the cost of the top processor yet I put out 10% better performance.

After we have done our editing, its nice to see the final results faster than waiting for a few hours for it to happen.

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