bunch of nooby overclocking questions

Reaper 392 · 15 Jun 2011 at 13:40

i'm going to be overclocking my processor soon, but since i have never done it before i thought i'd get some advice:

1. what happens if i'm an idiot and set the overclock stupidly too high (lets say i accidentally set the multiplier to 100, or the FSB to 2500Mhz)
2. when the overclock starts to become unstable, what are the first signs? (i will be stress testing it thoroughly with prime95)
3. if the overclock is too high, and stops me from being able to boot into windows, how will i remove the overclock?
4. is there any advantage to front side bus overclocking over just increasing the multiplier?
since the motherboard tends to get quite hot when gaming, so i was just planning on upping the multiplier and leaving the FSB at stock (or it did get hot when i had the standard cooler, the new one probably helps the mobo temps quite a bit)
5. quite a few people say that, to overclock, i need to turn the AMD equivalent of intel speedstep off. i would much prefer to have this feature turned on because there is no need to have my processor at 4Ghz or whatever all the time, so is there anything i will need to do to make sure this system stays on when i overclock?

i know the basic limits for this processor: 1.5V and 62C, and plan to keep within them (probably wont go above 1.45V)

weird_dave · 15 Jun 2011 at 14:41

1: It just won't boot.
2: It'll crash.
3: reset the CMOS if you can't get into the BIOS to change the overclock.
4: Yes, communication between stuff is quicker (assuming you can get it stable!)
5: I'm out of the loop on AMD stuff

Reaper 392 · 15 Jun 2011 at 14:54

ah brilliant. looks like i cant go too far wrong with overclocking then.

one thing ive just remembered about overclocking the FSB is that the ram will get sped up, however, theres something about ram:CPU ratios i can change i believe, so that should be ok

weird_dave · 17 Jun 2011 at 12:55

I'd start with the multiplier first and work out what CPU speed you can get to so that you can be fairly sure it isn't something else falling over and not the CPU.

Reaper 392 · 17 Jun 2011 at 13:09

weird_dave said:
I'd start with the multiplier first and work out what CPU speed you can get to so that you can be fairly sure it isn't something else falling over and not the CPU.

to be honest, i was pretty much planning on doing that anyway. might not get 100% out of my system, but its far easier

whipgeez · 17 Jun 2011 at 19:59

good luck, let us know how you get on

Randall8686 · 17 Jun 2011 at 20:10

the only way you can seriously damage stuff is with over volting, But its like any kind of tuning there is a risk involved, if you tune your car with a remap, your running more power through stock hardware ie standard pistons and rods, but with cpu overclocking not many people bust there equipment tbh i ran my last cpu overclocked from 2.66 to 3.75 for 4 years and it never missed a beat

whipgeez · 17 Jun 2011 at 20:17

with asus boards you could (if wanted to) try turbo v, set the voltage manually in the bios to a safe voltage first then use the auto overclock feature with the option of set volts(the ones you set yourself), see what it goes up to and prime 95 after that to test it for stability

Reaper 392 · 17 Jun 2011 at 23:20

whipgeez said:
with asus boards you could (if wanted to) try turbo v, set the voltage manually in the bios to a safe voltage first then use the auto overclock feature with the option of set volts(the ones you set yourself), see what it goes up to and prime 95 after that to test it for stability

if anything i would use the turbo key to do the overclocking, because using the power button to overclock my processor would excite my childish self

however, i'm just gonna stick with the old fashioned bios overclock