Legit Reviews

OK, this is my first foray into overclocking so be gentle...

I've read through a couple guides but I'm still a little fuzzy, should I start with a certain mult. say 9x, and raise the FSB as high as possible, write that OC down and try the next mult. say 10x, until I find the highest stable OC or is there a better/safer method? I've read that RAM runs fastest at certain FSBs but I'm not really clear on how that all works.

I can find my way around in BIOS so I'm not completely hopeless, and I have played with OCing my RAM (hit 4-3-3-5 1t stable; have it set at 4-4-4-12 while OCing CPU).

Any help would be appreciated and full system is in my sig.

Thanks,
Kyle

If you know your way around the BIOS in your motherboard then overclocking shouldn't be a big problem for you; here are some basic steps for those just starting off with overclocking:

Set your memory clock speed one step lower than what you have and in your case it would be DDR2-667, set the timings of your memory to the default settings, increase the HTT/FSB.

OK thanks, I thought that was the general process but I wanted to be sure...what about the mult should I just leave that at stock or raise/lower it? Thanks for the help!

10 will oc the ram more. and 11 wont. the lower the mult the higher the oc on the ram.

Alathald wrote:OK thanks, I thought that was the general process but I wanted to be sure...what about the mult should I just leave that at stock or raise/lower it? Thanks for the help!

First test with a low multi (7x) and set the ram to 533MHz divider. Then increase the FSB slowly. This will test your motherboard. You need to find out how high the board can go before trying to OC the CPU/RAM.
Once you find the max, take not of that number on a piece of paper. This is you overall limit.
Then set the CPU to it's default multi and start raising the fsb from default again. Once you find this max, you'll have found the max MHz the CPU can do.
After this, lower the cpu multi again and start raising the fsb using the 667 or 800MHz memory divider. This way you find the max the ram can do.

Once you find the limits of each part, you can decide on the best combo. What you should be trying is to get the most cpu speed and highest ram speed WITH TIGHT TIMINGS. AMD loves low latency ram! You'll have to test/benchmark alot to find the sweet spot.