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Next thing you want to do is learn the rules of overclocking, especially if you are a beginner. They are as follows (and there may be variations of these rules, but here they are according to me.) : 1. Never raise the FSB clock by more than a 5MHz increment at a time. You might even consider using smaller increments, as this will allow you to determine the maximum clock speed on a certain voltage before jumping to the next level. 2. Do not bump up the voltage unless you understand the consequences. Boosting the 'vcore' to your processor can both add a great deal of heat output to your system and put excessive strain on your power supply. The moment you raise the vcore to your CPU is the moment overclocking truly starts to get dangerous from a “your whole system might get destroyed” standpoint. 3. Do not continue to overclock if you see temperatures largely in excess of 60C. 60C is hot. You generally do not want any component in your computer running any hotter than this (with the exception of your video card). If you see your CPU temperature exceeding 60C, even under load, then it is a very good idea to quit while you're ahead rather than risking any permanent damage. This is assuming you have air-cooling for your CPU, if you have a water-cooling or a phase change setup, then chances are you don't need to be reading this guide. 4. Set realistic goals for yourself - Be smart about this. If you are new to overclocking, and you suspect your computer might not be of the greatest specifications imaginable, set a lower target, maybe 100MHz. If you are pumped up about going full speed into it with your new super rig, set it a little higher, maybe 600MHz or so. A general rule of thumb for the average overclocker is to shoot for a 10% overclock (3.00GHz stock to 3.30GHz overclocked) Overclocking Let me start off by saying that the system being used for this guide does not possess what I would call a “Good” BIOS, rather, it is an in-between one. The pictures will represent this, and the explanations will compensate for this. I am setting a goal of a 10% overclock, which means my target speed will be 3.30GHz. Without further adieu; the process begins with restarting your computer. When it gets to the post screen, press whatever button you found out about earlier, and use it to enter your BIOS. Once in the BIOS, go to the “Advanced Chipset Features”. First thing to do is raise the FSB clock. Depending on your particular BIOS, there may or not be an option for “CPU Overclock By:”, and if there isn't then find a comparable option. Either way, enter this option and you should see something that looks like this. Go ahead and move the cursor down a few notches representative of whatever increment you have preselected. I chose 5MHz* in part because it is a nice solid number for the first jump, and because you are unlikely to experience any troubles with a 5MHz FSB jump unless your computer is total garbage. You will notice from the pictures that my BIOS does not provide me the option to overclock the FSB of my RAM. This is a really big limitation for the extent of my overclock, as you will see later. If your BIOS does allow you this option, go ahead and do it: raise the RAM FSB by 5MHz as well. This means that both should be running at a FSB speed of 205MHz. (* Note: Some BIOSes scale the FSB increase with the selection of different numbers. This should be displayed in the right hand side of the screen as shown here.) Now that you have entered in those settings, return back to the original BIOS screen and select “Save & Exit Setup”. Type in Y for Yes and your computer will restart. This is the exciting part: waiting to see if your computer will boot into the operating system. Assuming your computer successfully got back into the OS (If your computer does not, read along further where I will explain what to do in such a scenario), there are several things you should do before going back for more overclockage. Generally, you are going to want to test your computer under some harsh operating conditions to see if the overclock will hold up and allow your system to continue to be stable. When doing this, you will want to have your temperature monitor up as noted before. In my case, I chose to just play some games at this first overclocking increment, and my computer held up just fine and recorded temperatures no higher than normal. The ideal program to use at this stage is called Prime 95. Prime 95 is a program that calculates some stuff that nobody reading this probably cares about, but the calculation is very hard on the RAM and processor, which is why it is called a “torture test”. Running Prime 95 successfully for a substantial period of time is a very good indicator that your system is totally stable. After completing this step, I ran CPU-Z and produced the result shown. As you can see, we have a solid 100MHz increase in clock speed so far, 200MHz to go. |




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