First-timer thinking of OC

[bioshockeruk]

Hi all,

I have a new setup, and I was thinking of performing my first ever OC. However some of the guides I have read have rather confused me, and I simply only want to try to see what is achievable by a small overclock. I have been told I can push my CPU to around 3.8Ghz quite easily.

My specs are:

ASRock 970 Extreme3 R2.0 AMD 970 (Socket AM3+) DDR3 ATX Motherboard
AMD Piledriver FX-6 Six Core 6300 Black Edition 3.50GHz Processor
Akasa AK-CC4009EP01 Venom Pico Compact CPU Cooler
Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C8 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit
MSI HD 7870 Black Knight 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
SanDisk Extreme SSD 120GB SATA 6Gb/s
Western Digital 500gb Blue Sata 6GB/s HDD
NZXT Sentry 2 LCD Touch Screen Fan Controller
Corsair Builder Series CX 600w Modular '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply

Now my question is one of two things, first can my system be overclocked, and to what extent? Will my PSU be suffeciant along with my cooler. My temps are currently 35c on load and 22c on idle.

And secondly, where do I begin, AMD overdrive or the bios or the Asrock extreme tuner app? And any good tips and/or guides to educate a complete newbie!

Thanks in advance...

 

[Hagar]

You should easily do 4GHz which just means setting the multiplier to 20x in the bios. This is the way I would recommend you do it.

Start at 19x if you like to get 3.8GHz. Load CPUz and HWmonitor on the screen to show your temperatures and voltages. Load and run prime to stress the processor.

Temps up to 62C for the processor are fine. CPU voltages try and stay below 1.45V.

Your PSU is fine. I run an 8350 overclocked to 4.6 and an HD6950 and running prime and heaven benchmarks together have never seen more than 360W at the wall.

 

[bioshockeruk]

I tried this and couldn't get stable in prime 95, crashed after about 10 mins and worker thread 5 & 6 stopped. this was at 18.5x (my uefi on my mobo is also rather confusing lol)

temps hit 52c on load when i reset bios back to defaults with it set at 17.5x (3.5ghz)

I also just replaced the fan and heatsink for a cooler master hyper 412s which is supposedly better. not sure if i have it fitted right, but fan is facing the rear pushing through the heatsink into the rear case fan which is extracting the hot air. I used a slightly smaller size than a pea in middle of cpu for thermal compound provided with the cooler.

Also I have added another 8gb of crucial ballistix sport 1600mhz if that makes any differance at all. It still says it's in dual channel as the ballistix sport is in slot 1 &3 and the ballistix tracer is in slot 2 and 4. (total 16gb)

Any other suggestions as I have heard loads of people stating they can push this cpu to 4.5ghz easily on a decent air cooler, and with my specs I should be able to right?

Sorry if this all sounds basic, but like i said, this is my first time performing an OC, and am really wanting to perform this correctly and learn.

thanks in advance

EDIT: btw what temps should i be looking at specifically in HWmonitor, as there is a lot of info there that's confusing me!