An overclocked device may be unreliable or fail completely if the additional heat load is not removed or power delivery components cannot meet increased power demands. Semiconductor devices operated at higher frequencies and voltages increase power consumption and heat. Commonly, operating voltage is also increased to maintain a component's operational stability at accelerated speeds. In computing, overclocking is the practice of increasing the clock rate of a computer to exceed that certified by the manufacturer. This corresponds to an overclocking of the FSB by 11.3% and of the CPU by 36%. Front side bus (FSB) frequency (external clock) has been increased from 133 MHz to 148 MHz, and the CPU clock multiplier factor has been changed from 13.5 to 16.5.

Overclocking BIOS setup on an ABIT NF7-S motherboard with an AMD Athlon XP processor.