Beginner to start overclocking

[Shicky]

Hey all, the situation is as the title suggests, i've come round to the idea that overclocking is how u get your moneys worth and now is the time as they say. Probably wont get this all sorted till after my exams, infact im probably only starting this whole thread now to avoid revision, but anyway!

Basically i got myself some rounded IDE cables for the improved airflow, gonna get myself a decent cpu cooler and some TIM soon and i'll be ready to go. One thing that puzzles me however is how do you actually know how well your gear can overclock, is it just sort of trial and error and what you hear from others?

Im trying to get sorted now so when i have a nice quad core setup at the end of the summer (fingers-crossed), i know what im doing when it comes to overclocking.

My current rig is in an antec 900 case. Hiper 580W modular (i know, im scared too). AMD 64 Athlon 3500+ currently at 2210Mhz. Mobo - KN8 SLI (Nforce4). RAM - 2Gb Corsair xms3200 twinXL or something to that affect! cant really see from here but it did set me back a good bit, its just DDR not DDR2. GFX - XFX Geforce 6800GT.

Think thats all that matters, was basically just wondering if my rig is actually overclockable at all? Im not going to go power mad maybe just another 0.2-0.3GHz if possible and look at overclocking the RAM and gfx card slightly.

Cheers for any help u can provide.

 

[SkeeterUK]

All i did was put the ram on a divider so it runs slower than the cpu, allows cpu to go higher without risking ram overclocks.

So put ram on 1/14 divider 3:2 i think in bios it says. Which lowered my ddr1 from 200 to 157 or somit. Then all i do is up the fsb up by 5 each time get in windows and prime it for a bit like a hour then go back to bios and up it some more and rince and repeat. Oh and lower ** HT as you shouldnt go over 1000 as a rule of thumb. So lower it to 4x (800) before you overclock.

If you find that prime95 fails try upping the vcore one notch and prime again. If it doesnt prime stable after 3 notches of vcore then thats probably it for cpu speed.