As long as your aren't OCing your GPU and CPU as well as overvolting them.. it's pretty hard to fry them... it's rare but possible

If you want to take the UTMOST PRECAUTIONS.. then keep reading

1) Proper Case fan control that increase case fan speeds as the ambient air inside the case heats up

2) Proper CPU fan control that automatically increases as heat increases (this is the same for water cooling as water cooling uses a fan(s) to cool the water). Some h2o systems allow for pump speed control that speed up the pump as heat increases (I keep my case air between 55-70F at all times. I have central AC, but I installed a Window AC right above my PC and run the h20 tubing and the put the h20 cooling systems condenser right behind the window units evap core. This blows 45F air through the h2o cooling systems evap core vs room air... which results in 45-50F degree water being returned to my CPU & GPUs. Standard room air of 65-72 is fine for most ppl. I don't recommend doing boinc applications with room air much over 75F

3) Proper GPU fan control. For ANY nvidia GTX cards, EVGA Precision X works best. There's another brand that has a simular product, but I'm not too fond of it. I DO NOT LET THE GPU DRIVER CONTROL THE FANS, CLOCKS, VOLTS, ETC

Even if you lack ALL of the above, you can get by with ONLY TThtrottle that will slow your BOINC CPU/GPU projects down so that they don't cross a certain temp threshold - even if it has to run your projects at 1% (100Xs slower) to keep your computer cool enough

Lastly... most any, modern computer (even if home built) will simply just "turn off" (cut the power to the mobo)if the CPU nears critical temps. Although this is NOT ideal as you can corrupt your HDD or SDD file system if write back cache is enabled. Most ATI and NV cards have the same safeguards built it.. once you hit a preset temp (usually 1-2C away from doing permanent dmg to your card), either the driver will just shut the GPU down and/or the GPU will shut itself down (computer will just lock or freeze or you will come to a black screen)

The last part is NOT ideal.. as there is some risk that the BIOS for the mobo won't shut down in time to stop CPU dmg, and the same goes for the GPU

But as long as you use TThrottle, that will keep you safe no matter how many work units, from a single project, that you pile on your GPU. If you pile too many, the GPU can get so busy that the computer will appear to lock up. Just make sure you know the max temp for your cpu and gpu.. and not JUST the max temp!! The max temp is the ULTIMATE MAX... before the ultimate max (it's usually 10-15C below the ultimate max is what I call the life reduction max. Once you go over that number, you start taking months and years off your gpu and cpu depending how much time you spend in this "yellow zoe(

If you are lucky, and have another computer on your network that shares at least one admin account in common you are lucky:

1) log into the other computer with the account common between both
2) open an elevated command prompt (Personally, I find CMD.EXE and permanently mark it run as admin)
3) enter: shutdown /r /f /t 0 /m \\computer-name

This says reboot the computer named computer-name (/r), don't wait for apps to close, FORCE terminate them (/f), don't give any time to the shutdown/reboot (/t 0), and lastly the name of the computer (/m \\) .. the \\ is very important

If you want to just force a shutdown vs reboot, change the /r to a /s, or if you want the shutdown to happen in 5 mintues , change /t 0 to /t 300

This will usually shutdown a system with an overloaded GPU. It will also work with an overloaded CPU, but you may have to issue the command multiple times until you get a shutdown already in progress message

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