How to OC CPU

[Eddy01741]

I really want to know how to oc my cpu, i have a 3200+ as you can see in my sig, i've heard people have oced it to 2.7ghz with stock cooling, how do you overclock it. My mobo comes with some overclocking thing that can overclock up to 11%, but that's not enough, i'm only at like 2.2 ghz. I already oced my X800XL, but i dunno how to overclock a cpu, any body know how to oc a cpu?

[PandaAttack]

Overclocking is done in BIOS and can be a tricky process. Your psu, cpu, ram, and motherboard will determine how high you can overclock and how stable your system will be. Here is something of an introductory guide to amd64 overclocking/ram dividers. If you want to get detailed, ask.
Make sure you can keep everything running cool and stable as well. After all, what good is an overclocked system if it can't take a beating and come out alive?

[Blak_Phoenix]

What would be a safe speed for my CPU? and how would i know if im going to do damage, appart from the pc simply not working?

[cha0tic]

Well usually your computer will shut itself down before you do any real damage (unless you overvolt the cpu, that is really bad and could damage your processor). The key though, if its your first time, is to take small steps and make sure you check performance differences at each step.

Make sure your BIOS has a Temperature Shutdown, so that if your CPU somehow gets to a certain temperature, your BIOS will automatically shut down your computer. My BIOS has that and I set that to have a warning at 75c and shutdown at 85c.

[Ion]

So you normally increase voltage one unit at a time, then check performance, increase again, and check. Rinse and repeat until you reach an unstable (too hot, choppy, etc) point and then roll back down one volt?

[12M_Marshall]

Overclocking your system

overclocking a cpu is a lot easier than you might think, but as most people on this forum know, it's not the voltage increase that gets you more power; it's increasing the front side bus (FSB) speed that gets you more computing power. The key is getting the highest stable FSB speed with voltage sufficient to keep the system stable and not too hot. The only other real concern is your memory. Just like your cpu, the greater the speed you run it, the more volts you will need to keep it stable. The typical default voltage for today's memory is 2.5/2.6 volts. I have yet to find memory that can not tolerate 2.8volts.

First off, it's quite possible that you can increase your FSB to say 210 from 200 without even changing your voltages and still have a stable system. It really depends on what you are shooting for and the quality of your memory and power supply.

First, let's focus on the cpu...
The typical AMD cpu can easily handle 1.55 V before you really have to worry about whether it will survive. The problem is that the heat generated at 1.55V may exceed the capacity of your heatsink and therefore the temperature will rise to a point where the processor will become unstable or worse.

The first thing to do is to see what your bios is telling you the default voltage is.... usually found in the pc health section of award bios or it maybe in the "tweaking" section of your bios if you are running abit, gigabit, or DFI etc....
Let's say the voltage is 1.35 volts. If you are worried about system heat and you are not using some advanced cooling method (anything but air cooling), I would suggest you first test your system for heat disappation. In other words, forget about the FSB at first and focus on the heat generated at new voltage settings. For example, set your voltage to something safe like 1.45 V. Reboot the machine and go into your bios and check and see what the real voltage has been changed to. You might be surprised, but a lot of bios settings aren't very accurate and sometimes a .1V change by bios can have a huge variability. Let's say it now reads 1.44V. great. Now, monitor temperature...there are many tools out there including sisoft's sandra and others to do this.
For AMD processors anything over 60 degrees C at load will be unstable so you have a lot of "wiggle" room. Once you are "comfortable" with the voltage setting, next is memory tweaking....

Memory is very different that your cpu, because in the worse case scenario you can change your memory timings from say 1:1 where the cpu and memory are running the same FSB speed to say 5:4 where the memory is running 4/5ths of the speed of the cpu. So in a sense you can overclock your cpu without overclocking your memory. In general this is not adviseable because there is usually a significant cost in computing power as memory throughput may be compromised. Most quality memory can handle a 25% overclock with little effort with the caveot that you may need to reduce your memory timings to do it. As a starting point, I would not change the memory timings from spd; I would instead simply up the memory voltage to say 2.8V. This should be safe for most any quality memory. As before, check the real voltage in bios after a reboot to make sure it's not reading 3.1V or something catastrophic. Now you are ready to overclock. I'm going to assume that default settings had not been touched. Unfortunately this usually is not the best timings your memory may handle, but it's a start.

So far you have only chosen voltages for your processor and memory that you are comfortable with and you need now only to change your FSB setting.
I would suggest 5-10 mhz increments starting with 210. Boot and run one of the many burn-in programs or simply start bf2 and see if it's stable for 10 minutes of play. If it is... up it another 5mhz.

CAUTION
you must know where and how to reset your mobo's cmos just in case...usually a pin.
the bad news... if you reset your cmos you will lose all your settings unless you have a kickass killer board like dfi!

Another caution. Sometimes when overclocking with XP you may get to the windows boot and see some sort of catastrophic error message like no boot record or ntkernal bad or missing etc etc etc. Usually tweaking your fsb down to your previous setting will fix it.

that's it.

[The_Misfit]

great replies......the author should be able to work with it from there...

just to reiterate... the fsb speed and multipliers will get you where you want to go, but it'll depend on the mobo/chipset/bios combination.. For me, I went with a mobile processor, built to handle a bit more heat and working with it in the bios was damn easy.

Its only a 2600, but I've got it running at 3200, around 2.2ghtz... My memory settings took a bit to get right, I had jacked up the latency quite a bit and the voltage as well, but after my 1st tweak I had apps randomly crashing and windows itself even freaked out. Ended up going with the "aggressive" preset and have kept the memory there..

Also, depending on how drastic your change, Windows may have some issues. On one upgrade, using simliar chipsets, I had to reformat due to the BSOD (blue screen of death). Now windows just reads my processor as "Unknown cpu type" ...pwnt! :)

[Merlin]

11% is not bad, most prople will only get a 10-15% increase. I have managed to get my CPU overclocked by 25%. Purely becuse my 2.4 P4 was the lowest in its range so it had alot of headroom on it. + My ram allowed the increase of the FSB from 200 to 250 because of its less agressive timings (CAS 2.5).

Really it depends on how far the architecture of your cpu will allow you to go. There is a wall that your PC just wont be able to get past, you need to try and find it.