[jpokes85]

I don't know much about overclocking and some advice on the subject could probably save me a bunch of research. I have a well cooled PC as far as I know, It has two fans built into the frame, one on top and one in the top part of the back, and there is one added in the back in a pci slot, not to mention the one in the graphics card itself.


As far as my hardware, I have a q6600 quad core processor, an evga 8800gtx graphics card, and an asus P5N-E sli motherboard.


I was wondering what programs I should use to do the overclocking etc or antying else i might need to do. You can overclock the 8800gtx core bus and memory bus through the ntune but i read somewhere that it does so in an unstable way. I have no idea where to go from here. Any advice would be much appreciated.

 

[ericgl]

You may want to check this out: http://forums.anandtech.com/messagev...&enterthread=y

 

[nm88]

This is kind of a big topic. Here are a couple of better suited forums to help you:

http://www.hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...splay.php?f=56


In a nutshell:


Nvidia's control panel will help you find the highest stable overclock setting; start from there and back off slightly.


You overclock your CPU by adjusting the FSB (up) and multiplier (down if necessary), through the BIOS or through Windows software that can do it on the fly (your motherboard's own tweaking software or ClockGen).


Watch your memory speed, which is a combination of FSB and the memory divider; you can overclock it too in the process, but if you go too far it can fail just as your CPU can.


You can increase voltage (CPU and memory) to maximize your overclock, at the cost of more heat.


Good stability tests include Memtest86 for memory and Prime95 (the new v25 with the worker threads) for CPU and memory combined.


Read a lot before you start.

 

[jpokes85]

Would I likely be able to get away with using safe settings others have posted of their OC'd systems or is it usually just better to do it yourself?

 

[720p]

just to give you head start & you can go from there

first overclock to something low like 3GHz, you can do this on stock voltage/stock cpu cooler/stock case fan set to low in like 2 minutes in bios so:

1) set fsb to 334MHz (334x9multiplier=3GHz)

2) look at your memory packaging for example:

frequency: 800MHz

timings: 4-4-4-15

voltage: 2.0-2.1v with 2.2v overvoltage protection

using the example set these values manually i.e. 4-4-4-12, 800MHz (play with divider), 2.1v

3) set pcie to 100Mhz so as not to overclock with rise in fsb


that's it this will run cool with no stability issues, next you can start with the fun stuff bumping up the voltages (and heat), tightening the timings, etc. as you move up in quest for more speed

 

[jpokes85]

Also I just took a second look at ntune, and it seems like it may make this process a lot easier. anyone know if the way it changes settings is stable or not? I just happened to see one article that was suspicious of ntune but now I'm curious because it looks really useful.

 

[nm88]



Quote:
Originally Posted by jpokes85 /forum/post/12909636


Would I likely be able to get away with using safe settings others have posted

No. Overclocking ability varies from system to system.


You must experiment.

 

[jpokes85]

even with the same components?

 

[nm88]



Quote:
Originally Posted by jpokes85 /forum/post/12910527


even with the same components?

Yes.

 

[jpokes85]

i poked around a bit more and found out that my motherboard itself has a mode that automatically overclocks your cpu and ram and you can chose from a 5% to 20% increase. i tried this on 20% and it seemed perfectly fine, with absolutely no heat problem detected by the asusprobe tool that comes with the motherboard. indeed it seemed like the temp was barely affected and that the fans were getting rid of the waste heat easily enough. The one thing i didnt really look closely at was whether it changed the voltages or not.


What I want to ask is am I wrong to trust asus with this? Should i still do it myself even though it seems stable? Im not looking for the perfect overclock as long as its stable and 20% would be fine for me.


p.s. when trying to use tools like atitool and rivatuner i got a message for both saying that it didnt have a digitally signed driver and windows wouldnt let it install all the way or something, so now they cant seem to communicate with my gpu. Anyone know what the heck is the deal with that? (i have vista x64 bit by the way if that helps.)

 

[nm88]



Quote:
Originally Posted by jpokes85 /forum/post/12913676


What I want to ask is am I wrong to trust asus with this? Should i still do it myself even though it seems stable? Im not looking for the perfect overclock as long as its stable and 20% would be fine for me.

The auto overclock stuff is just rather arbitrary. Be sure you test stability with Prime95 (with four threads running for at least 8 hours), since an unstable system can appear stable at first glance, until it starts crashing and corrupting all your data.