Overdrive on 4670

Just as a primer, I've never really done any overclocking. My first motherboard didn't let you adjust multipliers, so you couldn't really do much with it. After that I just left things at stock speed as a habit. I'm not really interested in significantly lowering the life of my hardware, only minor tweaks.

I used the autotune utility for ATI Overdrive yesterday, and it put my GPU clock at 790mhz and my memory clock at 913mhz. It seems to be 42C at full load at these settings. The default settings are 750mhz and 873mhz respectively. I haven't been able to test this on wow yet thanks to massive Blizzard fail, but they seem to provide a slight improvement in The Last Remnant with no visible artifacts.

My question is, how far can I reasonably push this card without lowering its life expectancy? Also, will this minor tweak significantly affect its life expectancy?

you wont really kill the card unless your running at really high temps and your temps wont get to high before it starts artifacting so you have nothing to worry about just push it as high as you can before your games start artifacting or getting random reboots

OC'ing anything in general doesn't reduce its life expectancy much, unless you go insane on the voltage increases. Stability and temps are the biggest concern, for the most part. So far I've never had any CPU or GPU die overtime on me from being OC'd in the past ~15 years.

I haven't done many volt mods or other physical mods though (lazy), that would be where you can kill a piece of hardware if you do it wrong.

Just to reiterate, if the temps stay low(or even medium) and you don't up the voltage OCing is perfectly sale.
42*c is far below the danger point for a GPU, you have plenty of headroom in that department.

Essentially you now start cranking it up till it starts acting strangely/crashing/giving you visual artifacts, then turn it down till it stops.

So would you recommend using a third party OCing program then? Max gpu speed for overdrive is 800mhz.

thats because your cards bios is locked other bios's have higher max's but if you dont want to go through the trouble of finding one you can just use rivatuner

How high can one expect a 4670 to go on air?

no idea man try doing a search on google for some oc reviews...