Advice on Overclocking CPU

b0ng0

b0ng0

b0ng0

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I am trying to overclock my processor at the moment but before I overclock it further I just want to check some things.

Here are the results from CPU-Z before overclocking:


Here are the results after my first OC:



The system is stable but I noticed my memery frequencies have gone up and I'm not sure how much I can increase them by safely. Here are the options I have in my BIOS (this is just the screenshot from the motherboard manual):

The K8 Ratio is set to default (I guess this is just the multiplier).

The RAM I have is Corsair Value Select 3200 and was previously running at 200 MHz but I guess it's at a 1:1 ratio at the moment because it's now running at 210MHz (the amount that I have OC'd by so far).

My question is really should it be safe to continue overclocking the CPU and just let the RAM frequencies increase with the CPU frequency? And how far should I be able to push it? Please bear in mind I know very little about overclocking :) Thanks.
 
This is on a Gigabyte board isn't it?

Press CTRL + F1 on the first screen you see when you enter the BIOS and that should give you extra options to change the RAM dividier (and hopefully let you reduce the RAM speed).
 
For the purposes of overclocking your CPU I would say so, once you've overclocked your CPU you can then go back and see what the RAM can do.
 
Okay I can see the hidden options but there are a few and i'm not really sure what I should be changing to keep the RAM at 200 MHz. There is an option which lets you change the HT Link and also RAM properties - currently set to auto. Also I can change the RAM divider(???) it has an up and down arrow and 16 16. You can change it to things like 8 16 or 16 8.

Can anyone help? I feel quite lost..
 
Okay well I tried increasing my FSB again but the memory speed just increased as well. Should I try changing the HT Link value? (I can be set at default, 5x or lower). I have tried setting the DDR settings to manual (i.e. speed of 200 Mhz) but according to CPU-Z it is still higher than 200 MHz...

Well I tried overclocking to 215 Mhz but it didn't seem to like that for some reason. Booted once find. Second and third times, it just gave the BIOS memory check screen then rebooted. CPU temps are low, no idea why that happened...
 
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See if the Memclock Index Value can be changed to 166Mhz. That should I think reduce the RAM clock to 166MHz when the FSB is 200MHz and your RAM will only hit 200MHz once you up the FSB to about 240MHz.

You'll want to reduce the HT frequency multiplier from 5 to 4 if you haven't done so, upto about 250MHz and then further reduce to 3 beyond that if you get that far.
 
Awesome i'll give that a go today. Thanks a lot for your help, to someone like me who is prone to nuking components by messing with settings your advice is appreciated. I'll let you know how it goes later on.

ps. nice sig, i agree ;)
 
Okay I managed to lower the memory to 166 MHz but for some reason when I change the FSB to 215 from 210 MHz it just restarts after the first BIOS screen (it doesn't get as far as verifying DMA pool) and I have to go back in to the BIOS and reduce it.

I have the FSB set to 212 MHz at the moment and i've been running prime 95 for a while and temps have levelled out at 34/35 degrees C so that's obviously not the reason.

Edit: I have managed to increase it to 214 MHz no problem but still, 215 just seems to cause the PC to reboot right at the start.

Edit #2: Skipped 215 and went to 216 and it works fine :/
 
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Okay I've managed to overclock to 220Mhz now but I've tried running Prime95 and the test fails after about 5-25 minutes (depending on the test). Temps are maxing about 36 degrees C at most while I run the torture test. Could this be a voltage problem? The RAM is underclocked to 166 MHz (from the default 200) and the HT frequency is set to 4 from 5.
 
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