I've heard that letting your CPU run at 100% all the time is actually good as there's a constant temperature.
How much should I believe of that argument?

I don't really buy it, the fault tolerances for chips is much more then we think, I mean how many times has a CPU smoked on you without it being OC'ed, the Mobo blowing caps, or an HSF dying? Its all other parts that lead to breakdowns really.

The big deal I see keeping a high load average is that everything is connected really, and a High CPU load means your crunching data that's stored somewhere... the drive, which is just going to die eventually with enough writes.

Cheers,

Finegan

I've had lots of intel and amd processors during the years, all of them changing temperature depending on the load, and not one of them broke, ever. What do you figure?

I think it's better to run them cool sometimes then hot all the time, for the cores. Heat does more damage over time then switching temperatures, as far as I can tell.

If you want a stable, cool temperature, put your bet on water cooling. It takes 10-20 minutes for my watercooling setup to go from minimum to maximum temperature, because there are 2 liters of water in the system, and it takes a lot of time to heat up and cool down.

if you want to keep your cpu a constant temperature,
don't turn it on.
there are so many goofy rumors like that. computers
that are left on all the time go out way before ones
that are on for 2 hours a day.

Are you sure? Turning it on and off every day sounds like a good way of getting a lot of heavy temperature changes.
I've heard the exact opposite - keeping it on makes it lives longer, especially HDDs; spinning them up and down all the time can shorten their lifespan a lot. Same with all moving parts, like fans, appearantly.

I don't think it matters at all for the CPU, anyway, if it lives 10 years or 50 - it's slow and useless long before it dies.

keeping the computer away from dirt is more
important than anything else. if you want to leave
your computer on all the time, you better have perfect
capicitors in your power supply and on your motherboard.
all those little power spikes and surges beat the crap
out of those parts. i had a few friends that left their
computers on all the time, and they all had fans go
out within 2 years. all the parts inside their computers
looked like crap, even though they hardly used it.
computers run a lot hotter than they used to in the 386
days, when they said to leave the computer on all the
time.
i had a 386 and then a 486 that i turned on and off
20 times a day for 2 years each. those computers
still work.

Cheers guys

My work computers are on 24/7 almost 365 days a year. They range from desktop PC's to Alpha servers. Of course they are in a clean temperature controlled enviornment and have a conditioned power source. I had a PS and a tape drive fail.

Whats hardest on electronics is when power is applied.

On the other hand I only turn on and off my PC's at home and not including self induced failures I have had only 1 PS and 1 hard drive go bad in the last 10 years.

Electronics will go bad. If you ever look at the specs, some manufactures like HDD and CDROMs have a specification called MTBF (mean time between failure) which is an average number of hours expected for the device.

i've got something else to add that gives support to
the leaving computers is better argument.

back in '96 i was setting up a cheesy little setup in
several Mazzio's pizza restaurants around the state,
so that the owner could dial into the restaurants computers
and see what the managers were up to. i used pctools
something, i forgot what. maybe it was '95. all the
computers were left on all the time 24/7 for years.
2 of the machines, when we turned them off didn't
come back on. one, the monitor wouldn't come back on.
one, the hard drive died. it was a big hassle, and made
us look bad. i mean made me look bad. turn off a
monitor that had been on for 4 or 5 years and it doens't
come back on. the hard drive that didn't spin back up,
but just made a grinding noise, was only 6 months old.