Is it true that it will shorten its life?

I have an overclocked 9600m gt(650/1625/850) sitting at 52 idle and load at 74~78 C playing games for an hour or two maybe. The room temperature is not that hot though so I guess on a very hot weather it might increase more than 80 C or maybe lower.

My CPU is fine, idle at 55 C, 71 C at full load. I didn't overclock it though because my bios won't let me to.

What's bothering me is that most of the people here told me that I should not overclock my laptop because it will shorten it's life. My desktop video card playing games reached 70~80 C depends on the game for almost a year now didn't have any problem with it.

Can anyone enlighten me? Are they telling the truth or they don't anything?

 

I doubt it will shorten its life span as long as its not being overheated. I have GPU's in the past that I ran the crap out of and never had any problems, I never had heat issues.

 

Nothing annoys me more then ignorant people. Without even looking into the issue and looking up information, they just automatically assume the worse. LOTS of people OC their laptop. The only way it's going to die is if you let it overheat (btw your temps are really good) or the components are bad (ex: the dell 7900 go cards). I would never ask for any laptop help on any desktop computer forums, the first things those idiots will say is "don't oc laptop".

If anyone tells you different, they are full of crap.

 

The architecture of modern CPU/GPUs is very delicate. So too much heat will quite literally cause areas of the chip to stop working - then the chips useless.

But as others have pointed out up til the 'melting point' no long term damage will occur. The warning signs of a processor getting too hot, approaching the point where damage could occur is instability. When transistors get to hot they stop switching reliably, this causes incomplete calculations and the system will hang. If this happens then slow things up a little!

Just be very careful when oc'ing any laptop components. Cooling is always an issue with a laptop and the margin for error is quite tight. Just a small overclock can lead to heat suddenly building up faster than it can be exhausted. Darth is correct that OC'ing laptops is common and not a problem. But we can all agree that heat is clearly more of an obstacle in a 30mm deep lappy case compared to typical tower box!!!

Baby steps and back off the moment you notice any instability OR excessive heat build up.