Legit Reviews

After buying an athlon x2 3800 which runs at 2ghz I have been thinking about overclocking. The thing is every overclocking forum/post I read, a really good cooling system is stressed on, and for people overclocking their cpu's by 500-1000 ghz I can understand why. I personally would like to over clock mine to about 2.2 maybe 2.3 ghz and I was wondering if I could just use my stock heatsink + fan.

If not, then to what degree can you use your stock heatsink + fan?


Since i don't want to by a cooling system this month or the next and since people stress about this I am seeing this as a dilemma.

main problem is that the most amds are 90 nm which tend to heat up. best thing you can do for cooling. is pick up some arctic silver 5 (w/o breaking the bank wise) u could take it to 2.2 gigs w/o having to rly worry about temps.

First reply: New Cooling system.. Why would that artic system be better then my stock heatsink + fan.. I also have a case fan...

Arctic silver is just the thermal interface material between your heatsink and processor, if this works better then your heatsink can dissipate more heat. Just changing to AS5 (though i would recommend AS ceramic) will usually knock 1-3oC off the CPU temperature.

I would have thought that the stock cooler would be able to handle a 200Mhz OC. The only way to find out is to do it and monitor your load temps with Coretemp. If you are happy that its not too high then leave it, but if it bothers you then just go back to stock.

Dan

isn't that stuff already between the processor and the heatsink? Well it has to be are you could damage your processor-metal on metal is not good-

There is stock Thermal Interface Material there, but it isn't as efficient as AS5 or any other replacement stuff.

Dan

just keep an eye on temps as you overclock - go 100 mhz at a time and stay below around 60C ( from what everyone told me ).

You might not need anything else as long as your temps stay low enough.

Mike

Will start as soon as my 90day warranty dies hehe.. I wonder why people pay 200-300 extra dollars for an extended warranty.. chances are nothing major will ever happen and if something does.. you can use the money you would have spent on the warranty to buy a new mother board or w/e it is you need.

go 1 mhz at a time. 201, 202, 203,204 etc

takes along time but worth it.

couldnt you go 100mhz at a time, then when you get close to your core temp max just scale down to 5 or 1?

just being a smartass

vicaphit wrote:couldnt you go 100mhz at a time, then when you get close to your core temp max just scale down to 5 or 1?

just being a smartass

That is how I did mine...
First I found a max acceptable vCore (vCore is the major determinate of your temp because it regulates the voltage across your cpu) then went 1&2 mHz at a time to squeeze the most out of that vCore...just don't forgot to underclock you're RAM during the process.

I dont know if my CPU has a temp gauge... will that temp program work on any CPU?

I doubt you need any program if your not over-clocking.. I wont get one until sometime this summer.. my pc is still fairly new and isn't a bit slow.. and i still have 180 gigs free... :D

but if you really want to.. i am pretty sure most up to date programs will support your cpu if it isn't too old